5 bots to try this week: Obie, Reddit Bot, George Takei, Converse.ai, and Betalist

What does one do after a career spanning more than 40 feature films and hundreds of television roles; earning a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; and, as Hikaru Sulu, piloting the USS Enterprise to regions of the universe where no man has gone before? Well, if you’re actor-turned-social media star George Takei, you launch an eponymous bot. (See number three below.)

Here are the five most popular bots this past week, as they appear on Botlist. Give them a try and let us know what you think.

5. Betalist

For all product geeks and tech nerds: Browsing is dead — get what you want to hear delivered to you.

Available on Messenger

4. Converse.ai

Converse.ai is the ultimate platform for building, training, and launching chatbots quickly and easily. Using the Chatflow system, automated conversations can be easily built through drag-and-drop modules in a matter of minutes. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, with offices in London, England and a development center in Edinburgh, Scotland, the platform has been designed to increase productivity, efficiency, and brand loyalty through responsive, intelligent customer conversations.

Available on Messenger, Slack, and Twitter

3. George Takei

The Messenger chatbot features Takei-branded content, such as jokes, horoscopes, cartoons, and memes that are meant to capture the personality of the actor-turned-social media star. The chatbot also includes a way for fans to leave a message for George (much like the White House chatbot that debuted this summer). The beta version will only be available to the first 1,000 people who sign up.

Available on Messenger

2. Reddit Bot

The front page of the internet, on Messenger.

Available on Messenger

1. Obie

Knowledge now lives in too many places. Whether what you seek is in a wiki, a cloud storage platform, learning software, or your coworker’s head, searching for the information you need can be annoying and unproductive. Obie is your new digital teammate to help you share and access knowledge across your team.

Save time and ask Obie questions right in Slack. He will search connected platforms like Google Drive, Confluence, and Tasytt, and will even help you document knowledge without leaving the Slack interface. The more you use him, the smarter he gets.

Obie also delivers bite-sized pieces of information called Flows. Use them to schedule lessons, checklists, reminders, and forms, or to send someone an update on a process.

Available on Slack

Top 5 use cases:

• Sales enablement
• Customer support enablement
• Employee onboarding
• Company wiki
• LMS

Popularity of the top 5 bots on Botlist is based on web traffic to individual bots’ pages appearing on the site, which currently lists more than 11,000 bots. The bot directory says it receives more than 200 submissions each week and tests their purpose, functionality, content, and overall quality before accepting them. This week’s rankings were for the period October 17-23, 2016.