Each week we bring you a few bots we think are fun or helpful or worth the time to try out.
This week's selection includes the personal bot of DJ Hardwell, a bot that delivers insults in Shakespearean English, one to help your career, and one to find you a new apartment.
Angry Shakespeare
Red-eyed and speaking Early Modern English, Angry Shakespeare is a Slack bot that sends insults.
Type /insult and a username and you can send random insults to colleagues like "Thy tongue outvenoms all the worms of Nile" or "You are as a candle, the better burnt out." Insults can be sent publicly in groups or privately to a single person.
Hardwell
This bot allows the 8.5 million Facebook fans of DJ Hardwell to send him art, leave him a voice message that may be featured on his weekly show Hardwell On Air, or get his latest work, among other things.
You can also vote to choose the best track of the week. My favorite part is that you don't need to leave Messenger to listen to the best track finalists. I also think it's really smart to use the bot to tell fans ahead of a big live streaming event, like Hardwell bot did a few days ago.
The DJ Hardwell bot was really simple to use and may support the theory that everyone should have a bot. It's an instance when the bot experience is better than a website or app.
Hardwell has been featured by Facebook Messenger on the Messenger mobile app.
Trulia
This is a pretty easy and fun to use bot that was launched on Messenger a few weeks ago. Just type in the city where you want to live, how much you want to pay, and (if you want) the number of bedrooms and Trulia's bot brings you a carousel of options. Choose the "Get Summary" button to get a paragraph description from the person who placed the ad and additional pictures.
Some potential areas for improvement: I'd like to be able to search by neighborhood and be given a way to explore neighborhoods. The ability to distinguish between properties with month-to-month and annual lease agreements seems like a good idea. Also, I'm not really sure what "low crime" means. An explanation of how Trulia defines low or high crime would be really helpful.
TagOpp
I'm sort of baffled why there aren't more career-focused bots out there. TagOpp is a job search and career guidance bot, and like other bots that help people get jobs, this one seems focused on IT work today.
