HYDERABAD: When Mark Zuckerberg announced in April that Facebook is launching Facebook’s Messenger Platform, a service that enables developers to build custom bots on Facebook messenger, the tech world went berserk thinking of potential applications. SportsCafe, an emerging media and gaming startup group lead by CEO Yashashvi Takallapalli, a Hyderabadi, is now the only sports news portal in India to develop a Facebook bot.
“Currently there are only a handful of Facebook bots in the world including SportsCafe that provide live sports news and match scores” - says Yashashvi.
Users can start their interaction with a bot by typing a simple message such as “hi” or “hello”. The bot allows SportCafe to provide a user friendly platform for their viewers to customise their sports news feed by receiving news only about their favourite sports or sportspersons. *Put simply, users can type in “news about Sania Mirza” and the bot will show them the most current news surrounding the tennis champ. Users can also get a quick summary of the article on the Facebook messenger itself through the bot. Soon, the bot will also act as a crowd sourcing platform where people can give their opinion on matches and contribute to SportsCafe’s news feed through comments, videos and photos. And starting next week, users who have subscribed will receive a daily digest ofexciting news. In the future, SportsCafe intends to leverage the bot technology to use machine learning based recommendations for each user where the AI understands the sporting interests of the user as they keep interacting with the bot.