06 Jun Yahoo launches Kik bots for news, weather, and virtual pets
Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft… and now, Yahoo.The onetime leader of all things Internet is just the latest large tech company to enter the bot and messaging fray. Today, Yahoo unveiled three bots for the Kik platform: @yahoonews; @yahooweather; and @MonkeyPets, a virtual emoji-loving companion. It’s the sort of scrappy move that deserves attention, an act of entrepreneurial defiance by a company facing an uncertain future with the likelysale of its core assets.
Even while some may argue that Yahoo is late to the bot game, the market is still very much in its infancy, and the company’s choice represents a pilot project of sorts. “We chose these three bots, in part as a way to learn as much as possible, to test each of the three hypotheses around them and their functionality,” said Jon Paris, senior product director of Yahoo. For instance, @yahoonews is an information bot, @yahooweather is a utility with social sharing aspects, and @MonkeyPets is plain fun.
Read full article at Venture Beat>>