Artificial Intelligence: a mainstay topic in film, art, literature and of course, tech. Though we haven’t reached the level of A.I. depicted in everything from Blade Runner to Ex Machina nor are robots taking over the world as shown in I Am Robot, advanced technology is making way for things like self-driving cars, Apple’s increasingly smart Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and of course, Slack Bots! Bots of all kinds are popping up for use in the chat app Slack, some with incredibly silly capabilities and others that will revolutionize your business workflow.
They’ve been taking over the news in the tech space and are of increasing interest to business users. Here are 6 bots for Slack that every Slack user needs in their lives:
Related: 3 bots that can keep your team on top of their work and happy
1. Nikabot
Nikabot is a fun way to help project managers, CEOs, or team leaders keep track of the progress their team members are making both individually and holistically. Every day Nikabot asks each member of your Slack team the question: “What project did you work on yesterday?” She then gathers the information provided by each person and creates accurate Gantt charts and reports with the data split by time, project and person.
This is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of the entire team — something that is especially helpful with remote workers and agencies with several different projects/clients.
2. Leo OfficeVibe Bot
Leo also manages your internal team like Nikabot but works to improve employee satisfaction. Leo asks employees a different question each week about how it’s going at work. As soon as new feedback comes in from employees, he posts it for managers to see in a private channel. He’ll also encourage employees to become closer with each other through praise and other fun activities.
3. HeyTaco
HeyTaco is like a scoreboard, except the scoreboard is full of taco emojis! When a team member deserves “kudos” or did something awesome, team members can award them with a taco emoji. The bot will also create a leaderboard and has some other commands you can use that are pretty entertaining. It’s unclear if HeyTaco will help or hurt productivity but it sure is fun — there’s only one way to find out!
4. Statsbot
It can be a pain to log into your analytics tool every time you want some statistics or to check in for the day. Statsbot allows you to access Google Analytics, New Relic and Mixpanel from Slack and can automatically generate reports when you use the built-in commands. You can receive an activity summary for today or set alerts for when metrics change — data has never been so accessible!
5. Workbot For Slack
Workbot for Slack actually allows you to do work in your cloud apps from Slack, not just pull information in (though it does this too!). Add a subscriber to a campaign in MailChimp, update a lead in Salesforce, create a new ticket in Github or Jira and more without ever leaving Slack. This bot understands context, which means you’ll be prompted with intuitive next steps across apps.
For example, if Workbot notifies you of a new ticket in Zendesk marked high priority, it will ask you if you want to see more information about that customer. If you say yes, it will pull the customer profile from Salesforce into Slack. If you want to add a new note to the customer’s profile, you can do so right in the chat. The ability to give smart notifications and get work done across your cloud apps within Slack makes Workbot a powerful business tool.
Using Workbot is easy and requires no technical skill, however setting your cloud apps up with Workbot may require simple data mapping depending on the app. Luckily, the customer service team and copious online resources make this a breeze.
Related: How Intent Bot can help you fully utilize your customer and prospect data
6. Hubot
Hubot (pronounced Hew-bot) is an open source bot developed by the fine people at Github. It was written in CoffeeScript on Node.js and is a standardized way to share scripts between everyone’s robots. It comes preloaded with a small group of core scripts that do things like posting images, translating languages, and integrating with Google Maps. Of course, you can add your own scripts.
Honorable Mention:
Notify
Notify does exactly what it sounds like — it sends you notifications in Slack. Anytime the name of your company or startup is mentioned you’ll get a note in the Slack Channel you assign Notify to. You can monitor various mediums, from Twitter and Reddit, to Google, LinkedIn, Vimeo and more. However, Notify is not exactly a bot because you can’t interact with it.
Sir Gifs Alots
This spanking new bot makes it super easy for you to add your own animated GIFs to Slack. It doesn’t seem to serve any business function but it will definitely add to a fun team culture! Gif yourself, Get Sir Gif Alots >
Excited to try these must have bots? Spread the love and share this list, and be sure to check out Part 2!
