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Ask HN: What kind of chatbot do you need?

45 points| alexander-g | 9 years ago | reply

What chatbot would you like to have? This could be a chatbot for Messenger, Telegram or Slack. Tiny and specific bots are okay.

49 comments

order
[+] sobinator|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] 317070|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
Sounds like what you really need is engaging work in a nice environment. ;)
[+] jaredsohn|9 years ago|reply
I don't think this would work since you need to make public the fact that you have such a bot. (I had a different idea for a bot but decided not to implement it for this reason; if this isn't a legit reason, I'd love to hear suggestions.)
[+] alexander-g|9 years ago|reply
Haha, already heard such idea a couple of times
[+] gelisam|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
Cool startup and cool idea on the bot. Sent the link to your startup to a few people I know.
[+] c3RlcGhlbnI_|9 years ago|reply
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)

[+] calgoo|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] arrmn|9 years ago|reply
I'm actually working on something simmiliar with a friend of mine, you send us a link of an article you don't want to read because it's to long and we summarize it for you in 3 sentences.
[+] amirouche|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] mirekrusin|9 years ago|reply
I'd like one which tells me which stock to buy/sell to make money.
[+] piceas|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] sushaantmujoo|9 years ago|reply
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...

[+] serg_chernata|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] kzisme|9 years ago|reply
> Messenger, Telegram or Slack

Failed to mention IRC? :( what gives hah

[+] caub|9 years ago|reply
msn messenger
[+] nico_d|9 years ago|reply
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
[+] swozey|9 years ago|reply
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
[+] daveloyall|9 years ago|reply
An expert system IRC bot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system
[+] daveloyall|9 years ago|reply
Feature: It should be possible to tag some facts as private, that is, tied to some public key. It should not transmit such facts in the clear; it should encrypt them for that public key. (Basically, I'd like to be able to trust it with facts that I do not want to share publicly.)
[+] daveloyall|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] daveloyall|9 years ago|reply
Feature: it should be open source and it should be strong copyleft.
[+] daveloyall|9 years ago|reply
Feature: it should be able to verify that a given message is digitally signed (PKI).
[+] Raed667|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
@cc_bot on telegram provides bus times. Only for London, UK.