
Ask HN: What kind of chatbot do you need? - alexander-g
What chatbot would you like to have? 
This could be a chatbot for Messenger, Telegram or Slack. Tiny and specific bots are okay.
======
sobinator
A bot to keep me engaged outside of work. I need to be kept on task with small
stuff around the home, chores, maintenance, finances, etc. Also when I've
completed those tasks, I need stuff to do/read when I'm bored. What should I
do with my weekend? What should I read on my ride home from work? Lists are
fine but what I'm really looking for is a bot.

~~~
bl4ckcontact
I like this idea. As a father with little kids, I find myself regularly
sidetracked. A bot that reminds me of pending tasks would be great. Bonus
points if that bot can also let me know of relevant, local community events
that are coming up.

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317070
A bot warning me when the boss has logged out from Slack (and is therefore
likely to leave the office soon). Bonus points if it could warn me x minutes
after he left, so I can start packing immediately, rather than having to
pretend I'm working hard those x minutes.

~~~
thebrettd
Sounds like what you really need is engaging work in a nice environment. ;)

~~~
lj3
Correction: he needs engaging work in a nice environment _for a company that
's currently hiring_. I like to call those companies 'the real tech unicorns'.

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gelisam
Not sure what the context of the question is, are you offering services to
build custom chatbots? The startup I work for, keatext.ai, happens to need
one.

We analyse free-form comments and uses NLP to extract commonly-mentioned
problems. Currently users need to log into the app and explore their data in
order to discover problems, but it would be much more convenient if we could
send the problem descriptions to a slack channel as our AI discovers them. It
would be even more convenient if the users could then ask our bot for more
details about a problem, such as giving example comments illustrating the
problem or listing the customers who are affected. We have the data required
to answer those questions, but even though our AI extracts information from
free-form text, it's not the kind of AI who can answer free-form questions, so
we might need help with that.

~~~
patrickgordon
Cool startup and cool idea on the bot. Sent the link to your startup to a few
people I know.

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c3RlcGhlbnI_
Mostly just one for every app on my phone that is just wasting space. However
here are the first few ideas that come to mind. Because it is a chatbot for
most of these things you can offer an app for just the local business, it
doesn't matter if I have to use different chatbot in a different city.

\- Pay parking (payment, expiry notification)

\- event tickets (purchase, rsvp, ticket image)

\- catching pokemon (just catch whatever and message me a snazzy report full
of pokemon names every once in a while)

\- ordering food

\- managing bills (let me know when phone/electrical/heat bill comes in, check
usage so far, coordinate payment between all the people in the conversation)

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Eridrus
A JIRA bot so that I never have to use it's web UI.

~~~
jclulow
Not a bot, per se, but perhaps you would like:
[https://github.com/trentm/jirash](https://github.com/trentm/jirash)

~~~
kevinschumacher
this looks amazing but doesn't support recent versions of JIRA unfortunately

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myroon5
I would love a messenger bot that messaged me when it was going to rain.

~~~
felipesabino
You can use IFTTT for that [https://ifttt.com/recipes/188-get-an-email-if-
there-will-be-...](https://ifttt.com/recipes/188-get-an-email-if-there-will-
be-rain-in-your-area-tomorrow)

------
calgoo
We need personal bots that deal with all other future bots for us. I dont want
to talk to the bot in dominos pizza, and the bot for facebook, and the bot for
google etc. I want my own personal bot, running on a server at home or at
least in a location where I have a certain amount of control and access to it.
It can be a framework of small bots with supervisors or similar, i dont care.
I just dont want to sit and learn how to speak with each AI engine for
everything I do. I also want to keep all my information private, not in the
hands of 1 of the big corporations. Instead my bot or my family's bot should
adapt and learn to speak to us, not the general public. It can answer requests
from authorized extended family members such as photos or videos, as well as
connecting video and audio feeds to the device I'm closest to at the moment. I
can go on for a while, but it boils down to moving away from centralized
companies and social networks and incorporating those systems as feeds into my
own system that manages all my information flows.

------
shekkizh
A bot that gives me gist of unread messages so that I don't have to browse
through all the messages and read selectively the messages I want.

~~~
amirouche
a summarizer. This is a field of NLP/NLU. Do you prefer to extract key phrases
or a realy summary that extract important notions and rephrase it. Take a look
a sumy for an overview.

~~~
shekkizh
I believe "extract notions and summarizing" is what will be more useful. Also
I believe achieving this would give us much better search inside chats. This
should be totally possible with the current state of NLP we have. Just lazy to
do it myself ;)

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mirekrusin
I'd like one which tells me which stock to buy/sell to make money.

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piceas
I want a chatbot that can allow me to practice second language dialogues for a
small set of short daily life interactions. I want to practice short simple
A2/B1 level dialogue describing my family, dwelling, local attractions, what I
did on the weekend etc. Duolingo (en->de at least) is a great start but I find
that it doesn’t help me with on demand dialogue style generation which I need
for interacting with natives speakers. Ideally it would also correct my
grammar or help with sentence construction.

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sushaantmujoo
It should be a utility driven approach.

For tasks & information which are required for a short duration & that’s it
and value for which is only for that moment should be implemented as bots.

Parking, ordering are all short, instantaneous tasks which are only of value
there & then. Anything that meets this criteria can fit the bill of being a
chatbot

[https://medium.com/@sushaantmujoo/messages-messages-
everywhe...](https://medium.com/@sushaantmujoo/messages-messages-everywhere-
but-not-always-of-use-to-me-7796fd93c270#.pzk3ati3q)

------
serg_chernata
Hmm, something to send me one article according to my preset interests once a
day. From sources I suggest but also let it search the web and places I don't
frequent. Let me ask for more. Let me save.

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kzisme
> Messenger, Telegram or Slack

Failed to mention IRC? :( what gives hah

~~~
caub
msn messenger __

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nico_d
Any interest for a bot helping devops with building and managing cloud infra ?
I'm tired about reading aws website to know all offers and prices, and check
tiens of dashboard to know status of my infra I'm thinking about building that
bot and i would like to know if there's any interest for others

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houssr
One that allows voting with in the team/channel. Bonus points if it can be
Quick and Easy Voting for Normal People (shout out to CPG Grey!)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orybDrUj4vA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orybDrUj4vA)

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swozey
I'd like a daily aggregate of;

    
    
      Git changelogs/releases
      News with #keyword
      Messages where my name was tagged @swozey and a few lines before/after
      Maybe my calendar events for the day

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daveloyall
An expert system IRC bot.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system)

~~~
daveloyall
Feature: When prompted, it should be able to describe (in machine readable
format: JSON, S-expressions, whatever) its knowledge base (or some specified
subset of it) via message. This will enable other bots like it to learn from
it.

~~~
amirouche
why a bot that can talk and speak would use another format to communicate even
with other bots?

~~~
daveloyall
Speaking English is not a requirement.

I mean, it should use some english words, sure... The words will come from the
KB though.

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clishem
One for lifelogging.

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Raed667
I'd get a bot to replace the Android application of local bus times. It is
basically a SOAP api so it shouldn't be that hard

~~~
alain34
@cc_bot on telegram provides bus times. Only for London, UK.

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MrMid
I'd use one that replied facebook messages for me, kind of autoreply.

~~~
teddyh
That could have unforseen consequences:

[http://www.leftoversoup.com/archive.php?num=612](http://www.leftoversoup.com/archive.php?num=612)

[http://www.leftoversoup.com/archive.php?num=613](http://www.leftoversoup.com/archive.php?num=613)

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ruler88
Keep track of my mental wellness and remind me to chill out

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viach
I believe you've seen "Her" movie. Bots are 30 or so years old. There is no
useful bot, except it has General AI, imo.

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arthpalme
I'd like one that gives relationship advice ;)

~~~
meeper16
They're getting closer to doing this but not quite like a human
[http://sumve.com/ai-chatbots/relationships/ai.html](http://sumve.com/ai-
chatbots/relationships/ai.html)

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0xdeadbeefbabe
The kind that would make a good president.

~~~
xori
The bar is low.

