Chatbots round-up #1: the best bots of the month

Fabricio Teixeira
UX Collective
Published in
3 min readSep 20, 2016

Chatbots are trending.

The idea of automating and scaling one-to-one conversations using technology appeals to lots of brands and services out there, and designers play an important role at defining how each conversation is scripted and the behaviors users can expect when interacting with a certain bot.

Here at uxdesign.cc, we have written and published a number of articles on the topic: from useful links, to reflections on conversational UI, to tips on bot prototyping. We even launched uxchat.me, a conversational way of delivering UX news to our audience.

Because there are so many bots out there (and tons yet to come), our friends at ChatBottle have put together a pretty comprehensive repository of bots, organized by category and by channel in which they are available.

The list below highlights a curated sample of some of the most exciting bots we’ve seen this month:

Travel bots

A bot for flights search made by Kayak. The bot has pretty advanced natural language processing engine. It easily understands queries like “San Diego to LAX October 15–17”.

Another pretty solid travel bot. Marina Alterra is focused more on hotels search. It asks you questions about your stay and suggests the best available accommodation options.

Instalocate is bot for Messenger that allows to track flights and any related information within seconds.

Photo bots

Take a picture of any object around you and the “WTF Is That” bot will tell you what it is. You’ll easily spend 20 minutes fooling around with the bot, taking pictures of everything around you.

A photo colorizing bot. It was created by an Israeli developer, just for fun. He suddenly realized there was a lot of people from history research firms using it to help on their work.

Productivity bots

Jarvis is one of the best reminders bots for Messenger. It behaves like a good friend, helping you keep track of the important tasks you have to do.

A personal assistant bot that manages everything about your meetings: from scheduling, rescheduling, traveling, insights, and even introductions.

An online scheduling assistant bot made by freebusy.io. The bot allows to coordinates meetings 10x faster with a chat.

Hope you enjoy the list. We’ll keep sharing these bot gems as we find them. ChatBottle is recruiting volunteers to help them improve their website UX.

Published in UX Collective

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