Powered by Botkit

From the very beginning of Howdy, our goal has been to make bots more ubiquitous in the workplace. Last year, we created an open source toolkit for creating bots called Botkit. It was announced on December 15th, 2015 as a part of Slack’s Platform launch.

Since then, there have been so many cool projects built we can hardly keep track of them all! The #botkit channel in the Slack Developer Hangout is active and growing. If you’re interested in building bots with us, please join and introduce yourself!

Here’s a collection of neat Botkit-related projects from around the web. Many thanks to the #botkit community and to Stefan at Botwiki for helping me collect these!

Selected essays, tutorials and experiments

“Where does conversational UI leave design?” by Stelios Constantinides

“Easy-Peasy Bots: Getting Started” by @D.E. Goodman-Wilson

“Building Somerset” by Sam Havens

“Building Slack bots with Botkit and Visual Studio Code” by Chris Sinco

“IBM Watson’s Personality Insights and Howdy.AI’s Slackbot tutorial” by Ashley Hathaway

“Make a Self-Training, NLP-Driven Slack Bot” by Andrew Templeton

“How to build and deploy a baseline Slack bot” by Vijay Sundaram

Plugins for Botkit

One of the best things about an open-source Botkit are the plugins coming from the community! We already have plugins to support natural language processing, bot hosting, storage — with more coming every day!

botkit-middleware-wit

The first middleware we’ve released connects Botkit bots seamlessly to the natural language processing tools provided by Wit.ai.

Storage

Botkit features plugins for three storage plugins: Mongo, Redis and Firebase!

Skellington

Skellington is a skeleton for your Botkit bots. It handles the boilerplate connection and error handling and lets you get down to the business of bot-making.

beepboop-botkit

beepboop-botkit allows bot developers to run a Botkit based bot on the Beep Boop HQ bot hosting platform and support multiple teams.

Bots and tools!

It’s awesome to see the things people are making with Botkit. Almost immediately after release, tons of people got to work building neat bots and tools. There is so much out there — I could only pick a few to share!

Sway

The Slackbot that tells you your company’s revenue, expenses, and bank balances, on demand.

Sway really surprised me when I first saw it. Pulling financial data into Slack is certainly not for every team, but this is an great example of a team solving their own problems with bots and productizing the idea!

Robin

Bring your office search tools into your team chat with the help of Robinbot.

With Robin, you can search your company’s office for an available space. I really like how people are building bots that solve very specific workplace problems like this! It makes me excited to see this trend continue.

Statsbot

Slack bot to keep your team informed about metrics.

Statsbot will fetch data from Google Analytics right in your Slack team using a conversational interface! Very useful for quick information gathering. I suspect this is the type of interaction we’ll see for lots of services.

Roundtable

Say goodbye to old-school reporting: with daily one-sentence updates, the whole team knows what’s going on and who needs help.

Roundtable is going after some of the same information-gathering problems we are looking to solve with Howdy, but I enjoy how they’ve crafted this bot around how their team likes to work!