SportsCafe uses Facebook bots to deliver content

Users can also get a quick summary of articles on the messenger through bot

Bengaluru-based media and gaming start-up SportsCafe, which has raised an angel round of Rs 1.25 crore from multiple investors, on Wednesday said it was using Facebook bots as a way to promote its content and was the only news portal in the country to develop a Facebook bot.

Facebook's messenger platform enables developers to build custom bots on it. In less than 4 months after the announcing the launch of the platform in April, about 11,000 bots have been released on Facebook though very few in India, according to the promoters of SportsCafe.

"Currently, there are only a handful of Facebook bots in the world, including SportsCafe that provide live sports news and match scores," said SportsCafe Chief Executive Officer Yashashvi Takallapalli. The start-up was launched last year by a group of five IIT and IIM alumni.

The bot allows SportsCafe to provide a user-friendly platform for their viewers to customise their sports news feed by receiving news only about their favorite sports or sportspersons. Users can also get a quick summary of the article on the Facebook messenger through bot. 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.

In future, SportsCafe intends to leverage the bot technology to use machine learning-based recommendations for each user where the artificial intelligence understands the sporting interests of the user as they keep interacting with the bot.