Botwiki Updates #12

Apologies to the folks who submitted their bots via botwiki.org/submit-your-bot recently: I received your submissions, and really appreciate them, but will need a bit more time to go through them.

With that being said, I would also like to take the opportunity and let everyone know that if you’d like to get involved with Botwiki, this newsletter, or any other related project, I’d love to hear from you!

As for some future plans, there are some interesting interviews coming soon, I should be releasing more badges — and a few other things that will be announced when ready 🙂

Bots, libraries and resources

• it’s a small step for @one_small_bot, but a giant leap for botkind
• the tests for the new SVG functionality for Cheap Bots, Done Quick continue with @circleparty
• @data2dada quite literally turns data into art
• @WITKillerBMovie has some killer B-movie ideas
• @GooglyEyes4U has, well, googly eyes for you
• @CustBot will help you find customer support on Twitter
• Humblebot promises to make you a better person
• Slack-Metabot will let you run Slack APIs inside Slack itself and Shlack puts a bash shell inside your Slack
• meet Lark, your personal weight loss coach
• Brett O’Connor put together a collection of tools he uses for creating Twitter bots with Ruby
• Timothy Hopper wrote a Python template for running Twitter bots on AWS Lambda
• Beep Boop bills itself as a “ridiculously simple hosting platform for your Slackbots”. See also this tutorial on making natural language Slackbots with Wit.ai and Beep Boop, and note that the service is $5/month and on the free plan, you will have to restart your bot every hour.
• and this tutorial will teach you how to Make a Self-Training, NLP-Driven Slack Bot, with Botkit and node.js

Reading list

• The OpenAI research team hosted an AMA on Reddit
• Facebook’s Secret Chat SDK Lets Developers Build Messenger Bots(techcrunch.com)
• The bots are coming:​ Conversational UI and introducing the Skyscanner Telegram Bot(codevoyagers.com)
• Assist Has No App. It’s A Free Travel/Shopping Chat Bot For SMS And Facebook Messenger (techcrunch.com)
• Cheating on the Turing test — Building the robot assistant (Matty Mariansky via medium.com)
• The Next Phase Of UX: Designing Chatbot Personalities (fastcodesign.com)
• The Myth Of AI (edge.org)
• A ‘Brief’ History of Neural Nets and Deep Learning (andreykurenkov.com)
• Inside Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Lab (popsci.com)
• Azure Machine Learning – Classifying customer support emails(blog.powerupcloud.com)
• Deep learning pipeline for orbital satellite data for detecting clouds (Brad Neuberg via github.com)
• The Botification of News (niemanlab.org)
• Stanford University CS231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition(stanford.edu)

Events and other updates

Algorithmia will be announcing winners of their Shorties contest in just two days, the Bay Area Bot Arts meetup group is having a movie night on January 16, Ben Brown is getting ready to host his messaging and chatbot developer meet up at the upcoming SXSW, and if you’re more interested in web APIs and online microservices, there is an event in San Francisco that has a session on chatbots.

Also, two new Slack bot meetup groups popped up, one in New York, and an official one in Slack’s San Francisco office.

Interested in learning more about designing UX for online bots? Get in touch with Austin!

And finally, BotWatch is now commissioning both short and long form essays on all things bots. To send pitches or for more information, send an email to botwatch.projects@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading, and have a great week!