Bots for Good

We kicked off this week talking about bots — convenient programs that can automate any number of common functions. Let’s take a closer look at some of these fascinating bots, including a few from the Glitch community!

Bots can help you with a lot of different tasks to get you through your day. Take Woebot for example, a friendly bot that uses Facebook Messenger to check in with you about your mood, teach you new things and give you insight on your behaviors.

There’s also Resistbot and WeBot: two helpful bots for civic-minded citizens. Connect with Resistbot to find out your local senator or Congressional representative, and deliver a message to them in just two minutes. WeBot takes activism a step further by allowing you to discover and receive alerts for nearby protests. Both of these bots are a great way to take activism and advocacy efforts offline and into the real world.

Need more inspiration? Here are some examples of fun and useful bots from the Glitch community!

Glitch user Elisa made a wonderful and practical anxiety check-in bot for one of her classes using Botkit, a popular open-source developer tool for building chat bots, apps, and other custom integrations for messaging platforms.

Curlsbot is for anyone who needs help with caring for their naturally curly or wavy hair. This bot asks a series of questions to determine your hair porosity, analyzes the ingredients lists of products, and provides recommendations to help you get the best results for your hair.

Two great Twitter bots — @TroveListBot and @TrovePoetryBot — use publicly available data from Trove to help you find and use resources relating to Australia. So whether you need a little poetry or just want to get your fix of koala content, these bots are here. 🐨

There’s also Glitch Notifier — a Slack bot which notifies you immediately whenever someone asks a question on Glitch. This bot is a great way to share your knowledge, pay it forward, and help out the Glitch community of creators!

Have these examples motivated you to create your own bot? You’re in luck, because Glitch has a number of resources to help you build bots for anything you can imagine.

Let’s begin with our directory of handy bots; a great starting point for creating your own bot. There are example projects here that tie into Skype, Discord, Mastodon and lots of other messaging services. Remix any of these bots and make them your own!

How about making your own Slack bot? We have several example projects available that can help you make an onboarding bot or build something more powerful using Botkit.

Looking for more inspiration? Check out Botwiki: an open catalog of dozens of friendly, useful, and artistic online bots that connect to a number of different messaging services like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and more! Get started by remixing any of these Botwiki projects on Glitch and show us what you create!

Hopefully these bots spark your creativity and make you think about what you can make today using Glitch!