5 bots to try this week: Octane AI, Coffee Break, bCRM, It’s Alive, and The Guardian

Walk This Way, In da Club, and Detroit Rock City are songs of fire and energy, so it was only natural that bots for their creators — Aerosmith, 50 Cent, and Kiss, respectively — would be a central part of Octane AI’s recent launch. This week, the bot creation platform moves up from number four to the top slot on our weekly 5 bots to try list.

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

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5. The Guardian

Covering American and international news for an online, global audience.

Our team of U.S.-based journalists is most recently renowned for its Pulitzer Prize-winning revelations based on the disclosures made by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Available on Messenger

4. It’s Alive

It’s Alive Facebook ChatBot Maker is the easiest way to create your own Facebook Chatbot! Create questions and answers and link them to your Facebook page in minutes.

Available on Messenger

3. bCRM

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Grow your bot business and increase engagement with powerful analytics and messaging. bCRM is a CRM designed for bot owners to help create and manage marketing campaigns. Segment and message users. You can even schedule campaigns to be sent based on the users’ time zone to help increase engagement.

Platforms don’t provide an easy way to see who’s using your bot and how, or help you send messages without having to write code. So the team at MetaCert built messaging and engagement tools so they could improve their own security bot experiences.

After realizing that every bot owner in the world has the same problem, the team decided to extend and launch the service to everyone else.

bCRM supports Slack and FB Messenger right now, but we’re extending to other platforms quickly. And it can be easily integrated with bot-making platforms and frameworks.

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Available on Messenger and Slack
2. Coffee Break

A collection of mini games that are playable directly from FB Messenger, no installs of apps or visiting sites. Challenge friends to high scores, challenge yourself against the weekly leaderboard.

Available on Messenger

1. Octane AI

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Anyone can use Octane AI to set up a bot in minutes. You don’t have to create your bot from the ground up, and you don’t have to learn conversational interfaces; Octane AI has done all of that for you. All you have to do on Octane AI is choose what you want your bot to do and then customize it to match your brand.

Right now, the bots you can build on Octane AI are valuable, useful, and simple. Over time, they will get smarter and smarter as the technology behind artificial intelligence improves.

Octane AI was founded in May 2016 by Matt Schlicht, creator of Chatbots Magazine; Ben Parr, marketing guru and author of Captivology; and Leif K-Brooks, the creator of Omegle, a chat product that has powered over 200 billion conversations.

Octane AI is backed with $1.5 million led by General Catalyst (Phil Libin, the creator of Evernote), Boost VC, Dimension 6, Brad Hunstable (founder of Ustream), Larry Braitman, and Allan Grant (founder of Hired). Launch partners included 50 Cent, KISS, Aerosmith, and more.

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Available on Messenger

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 November 7 – 14, 2016.