This week's selection includes presidential candidate bots that help you get educated about the issues, a bot-powered detective mystery, and a bot that helps sneakerheads stay on top of the latest candy-colored dream.
Bits
You know when one of your favorite musicians releases an album and you want it to be amazing, but it ends up being a disappointment? That’s sort of how I feel about Bits, the sneakerhead bot. I so want this to be a good bot. I’m not a sneakerhead, but I get the appeal. A chat interface seems like a great way to deliver the slow trickle of sneaker release dates, community chatter, and shakeups in the sneakerhead stock market StockX.
The use case is solid, but unfortunately the execution of this bot is less so. Bits has a limited selection, and August 4 was the most recent release date listed.
I’m excited to see this bot evolve, along with the general concept. It seems like a great use case to watch, as entrepreneurs with bots find ways to serve niche markets worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Bits is available on Facebook Messenger and Telegram and was made by Lisbon-based bot maker Pedro Pinto.
FutureStates
FutureStates was made by Andy Angelos to introduce you to the policies of major party presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as well as Independent candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
This bot appears to be quite thoughtful. It incorporates major issues associated with each candidate and takes time to gauge your familiarity with, say, the Green Party before responding to your queries. It draws on speeches, public statements, and campaign websites to answer your questions.
BFF Trump
BFF Trump does that one thing I hoped to get from FutureStates.
Click “Really??!” when chatting with BFF Trump and you’re taken to the source material of the statement, be it a tweet, video, or news article. Especially helpful: Videos cited bring you right to the moment of the quoted statement.
"Facebook engagement algorithms can skew the kinds of content millennials are receiving, which made us realize: Trump, the real Trump, was missing in the news feeds of the politically disengaged," the bot's creators said in a statement shared with VentureBeat last week. "The answer was to bring actual Trump quotes to Facebook Messenger."
Sensay
Sensay connects more than one million strangers who want to give or get advice on Facebook Messenger, Kik, Slack, and SMS.
Do an especially good job giving advice and you may receive Sensay tip coins. What do they do? Nothing really; they have no redeemable value.
Messages with a blue dot next to them mean you’re speaking to a bot. Messages with no dot mean you're speaking to a human. I got advice about Chinese food in San Francisco and the best national park in the United States.
The Fixer
This is a run at a very specific area in the bot realm: chat episodes and character bots.
Fixer maker Sequel has been enthusiastically building bots with personality.
Sequel is joined in this chat character space by companies like Pullstring, whose Call of Duty bot exchanged more than six million messages in its first 24 hours online, and Disney accelerator-backed Imperson.ai, which experimented with Miss Piggy chat episodes on Facebook Messenger this summer. Both Sequel and Imperson partnered with Kik when the messaging app created its Bot Shop in April.
The Fixer puts you in the shoes of a detective who just had a new case walk in the door: a cheating wife whose degenerate gambler lover is in trouble for "stealing a Tibetan mastiff from the richest family in town."
