Re: who pays for the API
Most of those bot-like things are used by corporations to bring together all their comms in one format.
Same way that Twilio can message over SMS or Whatsapp - so you don't need to change anything. You just add a Whatsapp account, advertise it, and your media people, your employees, your customers, still talk to you over the same channels as always. No retraining for your staff required.
Bots like those (and I don't know those in particular, but those kinds of things) are used as part of a "This is our Monday company message". Write it once, press a button, it goes out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, the website, email, etc. all together in an appropriate format, with link modification, etc as necessary.
Because none of those companies will work together to help you do that, so you have to have 3rd-party software to do that for you.
Sure, "nothing in it" for Twitter... but find me a large company nowadays that doesn't offer their own customers an API of some kind for things like that. Hell, I've spent this morning looking at my cloud-switch/routers API and tying it into a status dashboard along with a dozen other programs, including the site access control management panel which also offers REST/JSON etc.
"Nothing in it" except your customers making greater use of your system whereas without it they may not even bother to get on there because they can't use their normal tools to do so.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
