Building a better human-bot interaction

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I decided to write this article to share what I have learned (so far) while building my own bot, and testing many others. The points I am going to touch upon here, are coming from 2 types of approaches, both with the purpose of making the bot-human interaction as understandable and painless as possible: Context & Social Features. But first, there is an essential question we need to ask:

Should bots imitate human behavior?

There has been a lot of discussion about this lately, with very interesting arguments coming from both sides. In order to answer this question, we need to define and understand what a bot is. According to The Tech Terms Computer Dictionary:

A bot (short for “robot”) is an automated program that runs over the Internet. Some bots run automatically, while others only execute commands when they receive specific input.

So a bot performs automated tasks, responding to specific triggers and lines of commands, with no other capability that following a script. The complexity of the bot will be related to the number of tasks it can process and how complex and variable are the responses to…