What are Bots and Its Types? And How They Work?

A bot is an automated program that is designed to perform certain repetitive tasks. As they are programmed they run based upon their instructions without any input from humans. Bots often replace or imitate human users' behavior. Since these are internet robots they perform tasks at a faster rate as compared to human users'.

These bots operate over the internet chatting with users, interacting with webpages, and looking for attack targets. Bots can be classified into two categories – Good and Bad. Search Engine bots that are used to index content for user search or customer service bots that help users with specific questions are considered to be good bots.

Whereas, bots that are designed to gather passwords, log keystrokes, obtain the financial program and relay spam are referred to as bad bots. The following are the different types of bots that you will find working on the internet.

Types of Bots

1. Web Crawlers

This type of bot is also known as spider bots, which are used by the search engines to explore web pages and provide accurate results. These bots browse the web pages and index them, allowing search engine programs to know what lies in them and thus can return appropriate results to the user's search query.

2. Web Scraping Crawlers

These bots are also crawlers but are used for a different reason over the internet. Instead of indexing, such types of bots help with data harvesting or data scraping. This includes getting content through crawling, inputting it to the database and then extracting it for analysis purposes. These crawlers can be used for varied reasons such as comparing product features and product reviews.

3. ChatBots

Chatbots are computer programs designed to conduct a conversation with other users. Chatbots are usually tailored to specific types of conversation for which they are employed. These days they are normally found to be used in virtual assistant software. For example, Apple's Siri and Google Assistant are examples of Chatbots.

4. Malicious Bots

These types of bots are created with bad intent and to collect data through the forms filled online, spreading ads and pop-ups on the internet. They even collect email addresses to spam the inbox of different users.

How Do Bots work?

From the technical point of view, there are too many things which go into making chatbot work. However, from a consumer point of view, these are extremely easy to use. In simple terms, a bot works in the same way as that of an actual assistant. All you have to do is locate a suitable bot that suits your specific needs and then interact with it to make it work for you.

For instance, if you are interested in knowing the weather, you can use the weather chatbot with a simple question like "What is the weather in Mumbai today?" The bot will then return a simple answer. This is how the chatbot service work.

How to Make a Bot on Telegram?

Most of you had interacted with bots on Facebook Messengers. With millions of active daily users, many businesses are deploying their bots service on the Facebook Messenger app. Another platform where businesses and individuals are constantly making use of bots in Telegram. If you also want to make your own Telegram bot, in this guide we will explain how to make a Telegram bot without any technical or coding knowledge.

1. Visit Bot Father on Telegram

To create a new bot on Telegram, follow the below steps.

1. On Telegram, go to @BotFather and enter “/start”. You will see a list of different commands. However, to create a new bot, use the command “/newbot”.

2. Now it will ask you to give a name to your bot. The name has to be simple free text and needs to end with the word bot. For instance, “yournamebot”.

3. Once you select the name of your bot, BotFather will provide you with an HTTP API token. This token is useful and must be saved properly.

2. Link Bot with Manybot

Using Manybot, you allow people to subscribe to your bot. For this, follow the below steps.

1. Manybot is the most feature-rich platform for bot creation. You can open the conversation with Manybot by clicking here.

2. Once open, select your language and press "Create new bot" and follow the instructions from the bot.

Everybody on Telegram can open your bot now and start subscribing to it. If you would like to send updates to your subscribers, all at once, you can do so by simply typing “/newpost”.

Once you click send message, the text will be sent to all of your subscribers. You can broadcast text, images, and videos to all of your subscribers at once.

Final Thoughts

Bots service is on the rise as more and more businesses are employing them to perform faster and accurate tasks. Chatbots are one of the most highly used bot services. From Google Assistant to Siri, everyone using the internet has interacted with the bot at some point in time.