The Year of the Chatbot is now over. More than 900 chatbots were built for Facebook Messenger, Slack, Skype, Kik, Telegram, and other platforms in 2016. Now it's time to vote for the best bots available chatbots.

We are holding our first ChatBottle Awards in conjunction with VentureBeat. Vote for the best chatbot of the year here: https://chatbottle.co/1st-chatbottle-awards-2017

How the bots were selected

We decided to ask the community and industry experts for the candidates. We received 80+ bots for the following categories:

  • Travel
  • Productivity
  • Social
  • Entertainment
  • Ecommerce
  • News
Here is the list of people who kindly provided us the best chatbots made in 2016. The order is random. The comments provided by the bot celebrities are preserved (if any).

Spencer Yang (https://keyreply.com)

Peter M. Buch (http://www.swell.wtf)YuHsuan Chao (http://www.botimize.io/)Andrei Sabanskiy (https://botmakers.net/)Stefan Kojouharov (https://chatbotslife.com/)Joe Toscano (https://www.rga.com/)Pratik Jain (https://morph.ai)Jakob Reiter (http://theventury.com)Jin Hitoshi Tanaka (http://www.tastexpresso.com)
  •  My vote is Poncho The Weather Cat. There are three reasons. First, Poncho is the leading service in this industry. Second, it has a good notification system or personalization. Lastly, Poncho figures out why users need to use this service instead of native app and web service. It provides a good heads-up notification to users. I think the rest of service are not succeeded so far in terms of user retention and engagement.
  •  Travel: Hipmunk; they have a good UI and UX.
  •  Productivity: GrowthBot brings a good way and more productivity for the team on Slack. It's useful for startups.
  •  Entertainment: Swelly or Icon8. Swelly is kinda an eye-opener to provide a third opinion in order to make a decision easier. Also, it's a very unique approach for a chatbot, too.
Ekim Nazim Kaya (http://www.botego.com)Emanuele Capparelli (http://www.botcompany.it)Ricardo Blumer Grobel (http://www.botsbrasil.com.br)David Pichsenmeister (https://orat.io)Matt Burns (http://www.zoom.ai)Thomas Schulz (http://www.botscamp.co/)Sandeep Chivukula (https://www.getbotmetrics.com/)Greg Leuch (http://poncho.is)
  •  Productivity: PlusPlus++
  •  Travel: Mica the hipster cat bot (Messenger). Very useful for finding coffee shops and restaurants when on the go. Marsbot (SMS/iOS) is a runner-up to this.
  •  Social: I don't have any that I truly enjoy, but the best so far has probably been And Chill (Messenger) by Jake Cohn for the top Netflix recommendations.
  •  Entertainment: I loved the BFF Trump bot, built by Dexter for SS+K.
  •  Ecommerce: Kip. It's been the only one I've thoroughly enjoyed.
  •  News: Quartz. I mostly enjoy it for the notifs-layer, but love diving in when a headline catches my interest.

Interesting facts

  • 80+ chatbots were mentioned, for Messenger, Kik, Telegram, Slack, and other platforms.
  • 8 people recommended more than 1 bot for a single category.
  • The most mentioned bots were: Swelly (8x), Poncho (3x), chatshopper (2x), Growthbot (2x), Hipmunk (5x), icon8 (3x), Statsbot (2x), H&M for Kik (2x), and Burberry (2x).
  • 4 people had trouble recommending an entertainment bot.
  • Half of the bots support more than one platform.
  • 6 people mentioned their own bots or the bots they are affiliated with, including Peter Buchroithner (Swelly) and Greg Leuch (Poncho).
Reminder: Vote for the best chatbot of the year at this link: https://chatbottle.co/1st-chatbottle-awards-2017