Defining and classifying software bots: a faceted taxonomy

While bots have been around for many decades, recent technological advancements and the increasing adoption of language-based communication platforms have led to a surge of new software bots, which have become increasingly pervasive in our everyday lives. Although many novel bots are being designed and deployed, the terms used to describe them and their properties are vast, diverse, and often inconsistent. Even the concept of what is or is not a bot is unclear. This hinders our ability to study, understand, design, and classify bots. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of software bots, which focuses on the observable properties and behaviours of software bots, as well as the environments where bots are deployed and designed. We see this taxonomy as a focal point for a discussion in our community so that together we can deeply consider how to evaluate and understand existing bots, as well as how we may design more innovative and productive bots.