My bot wish list
All the bots I thought I would already be interacting with
This is a list of all the bots I’d like to interact with someday on Messenger. They are placed in no particular order. Pretty much all of them are one directional bots, just to receive notifications from time to time. I’m not sure if these ideas can be done. Still, I want them.
Sports Scores
Subscribe to your favourite team, league, sport and receive live scores, match start notifications, relevant news, anything you can think of related to your preferences. It would be awesome to receive minute by minute updates and gif replays for important matches. But I know that probably won’t happen because of lawyers and stuff. Ideally this kind of bots would be made by teams, leagues, events, TV channels or someone who just like sports.
This bot would be pretty useful when there’s a match during office hours. It would also be great to have this on Slack. Imagine a #championsleague channel in Slack with this bot where your colleagues could follow and comment on any match.
Hopper
Hopper is an app that tells you when is the best time to buy plane tickets. It works great, but if you’re like me and only use it for the price drop alerts then you don’t need a whole app just for that. I would like a Hopper bot that I can tell when and where I am going and then alert me when prices drop.
Dropbox
Imagine I receive a photo of my dog that I’d like to save on my dog folder on Dropbox, I could just forward it to the Dropbox bot and that’s it. Of course you should previously select which Dropbox folder all your bot uploads should be saved in, or they would just go to the default Messenger bot folder. Compression is obviously an issue here, but it could be great for fast uploading of pictures or videos.
Bandsintown
Similar to the Hopper example, Bandsintown does a lot of things, but the feature that started it all are notifications sent to you when a band you like is playing in your area. If you only want the notifications then a Messenger bot would work awesome for this. Bandsintown already sends you notifications through a lot of services so a bot wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Shazam
I already erased the Shazam app when the service became available on Siri but it would still be cool to have a Shazam bot. Just send a 30 second recording (or 20, or 15, I don’t know how it works) and the bot would recognize the song. Although this would be much cooler if Messenger would add a button above the keyboard the same way it did with Uber.
Hotel Tonight
Hotel Tonight finds great last minute hotel deals. It works perfectly but I don’t travel that much, so I only download this app when I’m going to use it. The bot would just ask for your location and Voilà!, it will send you a carousel with all the last minute deals near you. You will also get all your booking info through the chat. The app also offers customer support through a live chat, which could be accessed in Messenger by asking the bot for someone real to help you.
IFTTT
This bot would be something between IFTTT’s DO button and a command line. Just assign a word to a recipe and type it to start it. I know the DO button sounds much simpler than typing something on a bot, but wouldn’t it be awesome if you could just the send the coffee emoji to start your coffee machine in the morning.
Search
Any kind of search. Just type something and get a carousel with results. This would be great for services like Foursquare, Hotels.com, Expedia (flights included, right now you can only ask for hotels), and why not? Google. Maybe they’ll be useful, maybe not, but I’d like to try them at least.
Product Hunt, digests, newsletters
Instead of the daily Product Hunt email with the Top Hunts you could get the same links through a bot. TechCrunch and CNN already have bots like this and they work great.
News
CNN already has a great bot, and Quartz made that amazing bot-like app. But what I want is a bot that sends you a daily carousel with the top news and lets you search for news, exactly like CNN but with multiple sources. Some sort of Google News or Yahoo News bot. That Yahoo summaries algorithm would work awesome in a bot.
City tours and museum guides
Another example of an app that I’d luckily only use once a year. But what if instead of downloading an app for your New York trip you could just send a bot your location and inmediately get info on the place you are visiting. Same goes for museums, just take a photo of the painting and the Louvre guide bot will tell you all about Leonardo da Vinci and the Mona Lisa.
(Your city)’s alerts
I live in Quito, Ecuador near a tunnel that connects the city to nearby valleys, so a lot of cars go through it. Almost everyday the chaos on that tunnel is controlled but occasionally there are car crashes or the tunnel needs to be closed for whatever reason and I always find out about it when it’s too late to avoid it. So basically I want a bot from my city that I can send my location and get all important road news from my neighborhood. Like, getting a message from the city telling me the construction for a new bridge that will replace the tunnel has begun.
Beats 1 (radio)
Did you know that to request a song on Beats 1 you have to call by phone? Yeah I know that nowadays you can also use Twitter or pretty much anything else to request a song, and if you want to listen to a song you could just stop Beats 1 and search for that song. But still, wouldn’t it be cool if radio stations could ignore your requests with a bot.
Food Truck finder
The food truck craze just began in my city but I don’t know how many food trucks are there or where to find them. This bot would tell me what food trucks are close to me whenever I request it and alert me when my favorite food trucks will be in my neighborhood.
Brands, celebrities, artists…
This will sound a lot like Twitter or Facebook or any social network where you can follow someone, but I guess that talking to a brand or celebrity or artist bot could feel a lot more intimate. Of course that if you add a bot like Star Wars you would get the occasional preview of the teaser before the trailer the same way that you would get it in Facebook or Twitter but these bots could also be programmed to give clever answers and sort of talk to you, like Poncho but with a brand you love.
And if you take that same concept and use it on a celebrity bot it would feel like you are really texting Kim Kardashian! She could totally give you makeup tips and tell you which color you should use to your next party, it could be so much fun.
Lists, critics, curators…
I like movie critics, but I don’t like to read reviews of bad movies, I’d rather just receive a weekly selection of the three movies I should watch. So let’s say I subscribe to Variety’s bot, it would send the list of three movies every friday and I could also just text any movie title and the bot would send me a summary of their review.
Appshopper
I love the Appshopper app, it notifies me when apps I’m interested are updated or on discount. But, yada yada yada I don’t need an app for that, I want a bot. That way I could subscribe to Gboard updates and only download it when Google decides to support spanish, or subscribe to Lara Croft GO and download it when the price drops to $0.99 because I’m cheap.
Showtimes, movie info…
So about this bot, I’m completely sure it can work and it would be great because I actually spent time as an undercover bot for CinePass, a showtimes app for Ecuador. The experiment was a success, specially with the kind of users that really like going to the movie theater no matter what movie is playing. The conversation almost always started with recommendations, we would have questions like “What movie can I watch with my 7 year old? We already watched Zootopia” or “What movie can I watch with my girlfriend?” (that one was really popular even though most of the time that question really meant “Are there any horror movies playing?”), then I would send them the showtimes and after a couple of minutes they would ask to buy tickets. Unfortunately CinePass wasn’t ready for online payments. The bot was live for only 6 weeks but we learnt a lot about bots and how they should interact with users: asking people to recommend the bot to their friends after every successful interaction was a great way to get more users, and sending people reminders with the release dates for the movies they wanted to see was a great way to keep people coming back. The bot also worked great with people who already knew the movie they wanted to watch, they just send the title of the movie and automatically get showtimes for their favorite movie theater.
Hopefully a bot like this would be released any day now.
Additional notes: I read great bot ideas for TaskRabbit, OpenTable and food ordering and even though they sound great I didn’t include them here because I don’t know exactly how they would work, we don’t have any of those services in Ecuador. Also, I didn’t describe anything with transactions inside Messenger because I’ve never used that, we don’t have that on Ecuador either.
Thanks to Bram De Geyter for helping me write this.
If you have more ideas or just want to add something you can find me on Twitter.
