Yahoo launches chatbots on Kik.

  Yahoo may be in the middle of selling itself but it isn’t giving up on trying to stay relevant to Internet users. The company has launched its first three chat bots on Kik Messenger, a chat app that’s popular with American teenagers. Kik claims that around 40% of U.S. teens use Kik, and spend an average 74 minutes per day on the app.

The new bots are essentially a new spin on two of Yahoo’s more popular apps, Yahoo News Digest and Yahoo Weather. Now Kik users can “chat” to @yahooweather and @yahoonews, searching for the ID’s and then hitting a series of menu options to get things rolling.

Yahoo wouldn’t break out how many people are using its Weather and News apps today but says it has 600 million monthly active users across its 13 apps for iOS and Android ...

Yahoo’s senior director of product, Jon Paris, said Yahoo had chosen to work with Kik on bots before the much bigger Facebook Messenger, because of its early availability for bot creation. (Kik started allowing bots on its network about two years before Facebook Messenger did.)

“Kik was an early partner that we were able to explore,” said Paris, though he added: “We’re definitely looking at other platforms.”

These are the first chat bots Yahoo has released into the wild and they show a few clear attempts to get people onto some of the company’s other web properties. In the Monkey Pets app where you can feed a virtual monkey by typing the emoji for banana or apple, a cartoonish character appears superimposed on a nature photo that’s on Yahoo-owned Flickr. Tapping on the image takes you to the photo on Flickr.

Paris said Yahoo was hoping to learn from how Kik’s users interacted with its bots, which suggests he may also see Kik as a testing ground for when Yahoo’s crack team of bot makers can eventually bring bots to Facebook Messenger.