CHENNAI: Bots platform Gupshup has partnered with Amazon Registry Services to enable its customers to validate their bots and register a domain name with Amazon's .BOT Registry. With this, bot developers and operators can be found by relevant customers. Not only will companies be able to showcase their published bot with a .BOT domain name across multiple channels, but they will also be able to use their .BOT identity to get discovered without getting lost in the noise. The .BOT registry is a community dedicated to all voice and text bots and offers anyone with a responsive bot domain names that create brand new identities and specialised places for bots to reside. Users who own, operate, and manage bots published using Gupshup's tool will be able to be discovered by end users, irrespective of the platform they use, and stand out in a crowded chatbot market.

How do chatbots learn on their own and become "intelligent"? Read on to learn about the major approaches to developing self-learning chatbots. One of the questions we get asked by customers a lot is "Can your bot learn on its own?". The popular belief is that a bot is truly intelligent only when it's able to learn on its own. Here, we will examine what the aforementioned question really means, based on our experience building enterprise chatbots.

As the interest in chatbots and virtual assistants continues to grow, natural language conversation will surely continue to overtake browser and apps as the medium of choice in coming years. Barriers to entry for new bot builders continue to decrease. The pace of bots released grows as bot building platforms and connectors multiply, offering increasingly powerful and easy to use tools. In April 2017 Facebook messenger achieved 100,000 bots on its platform, whilst Microsoft claims 20,000 bot developers on its' Bot Framework . Continued increases in Monthly Active User (MAU) numbers on conversational channels further attest to the importance of conversation as a preferred medium for users, 1.9Bn MAU on Facebook messenger, 320M MAU on twitter, WeChat fast approaching 1Bn MAU, and 1.2Bn MAU on WhatsApp.

Every year in March the tech world descends upon our humble little hometown here in Austin for SXSW. The conference, and corresponding festival, is undoubtedly one of the tentpole events for the tech industry, one in which agendas are set, trends are initiated, and the "next big thing" gets launched. The real reason that SXSW is so influential, though, is that it's not simply tech companies talking to other tech companies, as is the case at many other conferences. SXSW brings a cross-industry perspective, where tech intersects with everything from government and global brands to sports and fashion, and, of course, music and film. One of the biggest tech trends shaping up at this year's SXSW is bots.

A lot can happen in 12 months. Last year, bots exploded into the mainstream, and adoption was rapid. For example, over $1.5 billion was invested in AI startups; Microsoft has over 35,000 bot developers on its platform; The Economist even asked if bots are the new apps. As with any technology that grows so quickly in such a short amount of time, sometimes we need to take a step back. Last year, we saw bots enter the home through the likes of Amazon Echo's Alexa and Google Assistant, and this paved the way for more bots to be introduced to our everyday lives.

You're likely to meet these challenges. Continue reading to find out what we've learned from developing a medical bot. Recently we have released Symptomate Bot – one of the world's first health check-up chatbots. The road towards a working service was a new experience for us. We decided to share some lessons we've learned during the process, hoping other bot developers will benefit from them.

Amir Shevat is the head of developer relations at Slack. Bots are becoming a part of our life. I wake up in the morning and tell Alexa to play my Brazilian samba, I let Amy set my meetings and I check stats and reports in Slack. Bot builders and users alike are starting to understand that bots are an integral part of our life. But what are the rules that govern these new tech friends?

Everyone's obsessed with "conversation as a platform," or the idea that you should be able to interact with a service with natural language, spoken or written, instead of in the traditional click-an-icon way you'd interact with a computer. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and a slew of startups all rushing to find new ways to make it easier for users to connect to all the services they need through a single interface. Just this week, The Information reported that Apple plans to open up its virtual assistant, Siri, to third-party developers who want to integrate their services. We've entered the age of bots. Evernote founder and partner at VC firm General Catalyst, Phil Libin, believes that bots are the most exciting tech he's seen since the iPhone and that they'll rewrite the tech space like apps did in 2008.

This year, Pavel Durov will be giving away one million dollars to bot developers in the form of grants starting at 25,000 each. All you need to do to be considered is create an impressive bot using our Bot API. What do we want in return? That's right, just support your creation and make your users happy. Here's a list of things that a bot needs to make us smile: Some areas you may want to focus on: integrations, tools for bot builders, AI stuff, and natural language processing, although your bot may do something altogether different.