What is it?
Chat-bot is a program-interlocutor, imitating human communication with the help of text or voice. Chat-bots help to automate tasks, working on a given algorithm. They conduct a dialogue with the user, fulfilling his requests, answering queries or entertaining with his answers. The first programs, imitating people’s communication, appeared in 1966. Virtual interlocutor Elisa quite convincingly parodied dialogue with the psychotherapist. With the growing popularity of instant messengers in 2010, chatbots have found a new life. Most work on the platforms of popular instant messengers: Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Viber, VKontakte, Skype, Slack. Bots can work as separate applications or be built into the functionality of search engines.
Chatbots can be divided into simple and self-learning. The first can interact with the user through buttons and pictures or receive text commands. The bot recognizes the text or speech, highlighting keywords and translating them into commands. Then it responds according to the given program. Most often in such chat-bots, there is an instruction with a list of commands and keywords. To this kind of bots is also DAR VIS. The second type of chatbots works on the principle of artificial intelligence, learning in the process of communicating with users, analyzing dialogs and adjusting to the individual characteristics of users. By this principle, voice assistants Siri from Apple work. With such chat bots, you can conduct dialogues on abstract topics.
Where to find?
The largest and most convenient English-language library of bots is Botlist. Here are bots (not just chat bots) running on all major platforms and messengers. They can be searched for by platforms, categories and ratings. More than 10 thousand chatbots for Facebook Messenger can be found in the Chatbottle directory. They have their ratings and even the bonus “bot of the year”. In these directories you can not search for Russian-language bots.
For Russian-speaking countries, the catalog of Telegram-bots Storebot is more relevant. The directory also has a bot that helps you search for bots. The Slack corporate messenger has an official storehouse. The Facebook Messenger bots can be found by searching. You can focus on a lot of collections of “most convenient” and “most interesting” chatbots for this messenger in Google. Many chatbots in the form of individual applications can be found in the appropriate tabs in the application stores. The DAR VIS application is available for download on the App Store and Google Play.
Top 10 bots messengers for Facebook
About a year ago at the Facebook F8 conference, company representatives first announced the launch of bots for the Facebook Messenger application. The functionality of bots for instant messengers only grows, as well as their number. So, according to Bloomberg, the industry of bots in the economy is developing faster than the development of the application industry in its time. We picked up for you bots from Facebook Messenger, which by their functions quite successfully replace similar applications.
HealthTap
Healthtap.com is a medical service that allows patients to receive answers to health-related questions from more than 100,000 US doctors. Bot HealthTap can handle questions containing no more than 200 characters, and display the answers of doctors on the relevant topic.
HealthyBot
Every morning it sends advice to the user about a healthy lifestyle, including recommendations and useful facts about nutrition, fitness, awareness, as well as writing from blogs on the topic of maintaining health.
Wall Street Journal
Can show the latest popular articles, search for news about a particular company and send a morning digest of financial news.
TechCrunch
Their AI-bot not only can show the headlines of articles and send the collection once a day, but also subscribe to a specific topic, the author, and also answer questions from the user.
Skyscanner
Skyscanner can only search for flights, but at the same time for the user search for a cheap weekend trip and travel tips (compare prices, the best time and the day of the week for travel). Also, the Skyscanner bot shows prices in UAH and not in dollars, which makes it more convenient to use.
Dinner Ideas
Bot Dinner Ideas is designed to find recipes: both by the name of the dish, and by the list of ingredients. Also, it can send one excellent recipe daily or weekly
to your messenger. Despite the fact that the interface of the bot is English-speaking, Dinner Ideas supports searching in Russian.
WTF Is That
If you often wonder WTF Is That – why you need things around you – then this bot will be useful to you. WTF Is That can detail what is depicted in the photo: from the car model to the breed of cats and dogs.
Hi Poncho
Hi Poncho is a nice and unboring bot that shows the weather forecast in a convenient format of pictures. In addition to the standard subscription for the forecast, Poncho sends urgent storm warnings, answers user questions and knows how to play games and maintain a conversation.
Qwazou
Qwazou will help you understand all the variety of bots in Messenger and find the ones you need. In the chat you can search by topic, as well as watch the ratings of the best and lists of new bots.