Rise of the messenger chat bots

During Facebook’s annual F8 event in May, the social giant’s VP of messaging products, David Marcus, revealed how there are now around 300,000 active chatbots with customers operating on its bot platform. These business bots and their customers are exchanging around eight billion messages via its Messenger service every day, underlining, if it were needed, ecommerce’s reliance on this form of automated communication.

A slew of egaming operators use chatbots to streamline customer services, yet there has been a gradual roll-out of bots for the purposes of allowing customers to place sports bets using messaging apps, eschewing the need to visit a brand’s sportsbook.

During the World Cup, Coingaming Group’s crypto sportsbook, Sportsbet.io, unveiled its in-house-built Telegram bot which allows customers to place bets in bitcoin via the cloud-based messaging app using its core API. Sportsbet.io’s sportsbook director, Joe McCallum, says customers began using the bot almost immediately, with an individual bet worth over €5,000 placed in the first 48 hours after launch.

“The average user behaviour was to make a smaller stake and then return once they were confident in the product – then their activity using the bot tended to become more frequent.” He adds: “The betting bot streamlines the full experience, stripping away all the noise and allows customers to interact and place their bets in a fun, fast and fair way.”

Created in 2013 by Russian entrepreneur brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov, who also established social networking platform VKontakte, Telegram hit the milestone of 200 million users in March 2018. If it was a country it would be the world’s sixth largest. As well as being the end-to-end encryption, Telegram was the first mainstream messaging app to roll out with a full open source client code and open APIs for third-party app and bot developers.

Sportsbet.io’s bot is a polyglot bot (English, Russian, Chinese, Turkish and Portuguese), with languages toggled using slash commands, while deposits, withdrawals and transaction history are also viewed using slash commands. Built in Elixir, the betting bot can handle up to 100 concurrent requests within a second.

“The Telegram architecture is such that a user sends a message to Telegram and Telegram forwards the message to us,” explains Gabriel Kolawole, the brains behind the product and a full-stack developer at Sportsbet.io. “The maximum number of concurrent requests that Telegram can send to you is 40, 60 or 100; we can take 100 at once and process them at the same time.”

If the user knows what he or she wants to back, Kolawole says they can strike bets extremely quickly. “A common issue we have faced is sometimes the messages from Telegram are delayed, but by removing delays a user can place a bet in less than a minute if they know the event they are looking for.” The bot has the same categories, events and markets (branches, stems and leaves) as the full product, but it is presented as a stripped-down version, Kolawole explains. “We’re tearing down the site into a text-only mode and taking advantage of Telegram’s core API.”

Mixed signals

One key reason for developing the bot, which was conceptualised during an internal hackathon at Coingaming Group’s HQ in Tallinn, Estonia, was to off er a more simple and accessible betting product in the parts of the world where mobile data is unreliable and/or expensive.

Indeed, the product gained substantial traction in South America, especially Brazil, as well as Indonesia and India during the World Cup – all places where users were more likely to face connectivity issues, McCallum says.

Telegram is also popular as a communications and information sharing platform for cryptocurrency fans and start-ups launching ICOs, so it’s logical for the likes of Sportsbet.io to use a bot on the app as the company accepts wagers in bitcoin and ether. Yet for UK-centric fiat currency sportsbooks there’s probably not much of a use case to build a Telegram bot.

“How many Ladbrokes customers are going to be using Telegram? Not many,” says Richard Smith, the former head of mobile at Betsson and now COO of Malta-based gambling industry technology outfit Mobilt.

However, some operators have rolled out bots of late for a far more mainstream platform: Facebook Messenger. GVC-owned sportsbook bwin released a chatbot, built by start-up Tokabet, for customers in Germany and Austria ahead of the World Cup. Available through Facebook Messenger, so-called ‘WettBuddy’ starts conversations with users around upcoming matches, responds to questions and can provide context-driven content, including match stats and trivia.

Meanwhile, Kindred Group’s Unibet brand also released an AI-powered chatbot for the World Cup that let users place bets through Messenger. It was Paddy Power that broke new ground last year by becoming the first operator to release a chatbot equipped with the ability to check balances and place bets through Facebook Messenger.

The product was powered by Onionsack, a company which has been involved in facilitating text betting services for bookmakers since the mid-2000s, using its SaaS platform. For CEO Jonathan Power, most betting sites and apps can be “quite torturous” when it comes to locating markets. “Betting sites must be the only ecommerce sites I know that don’t start with search. With the likes of Amazon, eBay and Gumtree, the first thing you do is search.”

He suggests that for those who know what they want to bet on, a chatbot or text message is by far the simplest and quickest way of placing a wager. “If you want to back four teams from different leagues and countries in an accumulator or a Lucky 15 you have quite a journey to find all those teams. And the person who knows what he wants is the kind of person who bets more often anyway.

A messaging interface, whether it is a chatbot or executes a search or a transaction, is a key part of what is missing from the user experience of bookmakers.” Perhaps, then, operators will begin to integrate chatbot and betting bot features inside their main products to aid with search and expediate bet placement.

Limited options

Betting bots do come with certain drawbacks, though. For starters, it’s difficult to allow users to bet in-play due to fluid price movements, offer cash-out and present live stats or live streams. There is also the inability to market other verticals like casino to customers for cross-sell purposes. “There are lots of things you can’t do on this [product],” Smith says. “But the main thing is to be up front with customers about what the product is, what it can do and what your goal is, so that people’s expectations are met.”

Above all, he stresses, the absolutely priority is ensuring the AI is up to scratch. “If you have a bad experience the first time when you’re searching for Harry Kane to score and it gives no results you are going to give up straight away. “It also needs to be quicker than the usual betting experience. If it fails here, the product will fail because you don’t use a product like this for it to be slower than going via the normal site. If those two things fail I think the whole thing fails.”

It’s worth noting that with Paddy Power’s Facebook Messenger chatbot, which is no longer available, when a user tapped on a price the app would automatically open up the Irish bookmaker’s website. This requirement by Facebook created a somewhat convoluted user journey rather than simply being able to bet via the messaging app using text commands.

Perhaps the Holy Grail for betting brands is to be able to penetrate Facebook’s other messaging service – WhatsApp – with chatbots in order to interact with its 1.5 billion users. But, of course, that would require opening up its encrypted messaging platform’s APIs to developers. “WhatsApp in the UK is where we feel the real win is,” Power states.

Earlier this year, a standalone app, WhatsApp Business, launched in selected markets on Android, enabling companies to use chatbots to speak with customers, manage their orders and answer queries. In a Q1 earnings call, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said WhatsApp Business had already gained three million active users.

Although Power describes Facebook as being “quite puritanical” when it comes to gambling, he feels the gradual liberalisation of sports betting in the US following the repeal of the 25-year-old federal ban by the US Supreme Court should lead to a relaxation of hard-line positions. “I would suspect opening up the US market means attitudes are going to change from the big American corporations like Facebook and Google.”

He adds: “That’s the advantage of Telegram – they don’t care what you use on the platform; you can do whatever you like.” As for Sportsbet.io’s Telegram bot, management has high hopes for its impact as the product is iterated and expanded to other sports.

McCallum says: “Going forward, the plan is to phase in all sports to the betting bot then make live betting available. The future goal is that our players will be able to place bets across all markets in just seconds. “Currently, users can’t cash out but that’s not to say that in the future they won’t be able to.”

As it currently stands, betting bots remain fairly niche. This isn’t helped by the fact that open platforms like Telegram have a small user base in markets like the UK, which means few – if any – of the main bookmakers feel the need to build a Telegram bot.

With Facebook Messenger there are user journey restrictions, while WhatsApp continues to be off limits. If these apps had Telegram’s accessibility, then betting bots would undoubtedly have the potential to go mainstream and provide bettors with a quick, intuitive and private (i.e. it doesn’t look like you’ve got a gambling app open if friends and/or family are in proximity) way of getting a bet on.

That’s providing you know what you want to back, of course. A bullish McCallum concludes: “We’ve only started scratching the surface of Telegram and other similar platforms.”