I usually get the question on which is the chatbot I like the most, so I’ve decided to share two good initiatives that help me on my routine and to speed up some of the tasks.

When I first interact with a bot, I try to get some of the below out of them:

Presentation – To know what the bot can and cannot do

Information displayed in different ways: combination of text, buttons, images.

Proactive, but not spammy

Sense of humor

The bot intelligence/understanding to avoid getting frustrated when I don’t get the expected result

However, I chat again frequently if I find them useful for my day-to-day work. The two chatbots below are living on Facebook Messenger and want to facilitate users’ routine by summarising or double checking information that is on the red.

This bot, available on Facebook Messenger and Slack, processes web-links with articles, images with text or audio files and extracts the most important information in real time using artificial intelligence technology. The outcome is a web-view with three tabs: summary, keywords and key fragments in a visual manner:

If you don’t have any article in mind, you can also look for latest news on a specific subject to get a summary.

What I like

Once you open the link/web-view to the summary, the header tells you the minutes that you have saved compared to reading the entire article, it gives the option to get the highlights within the summary and to download this as a PDF:

Another great feature is the summary size. Depending on the amount of time and information you need, you can use the below bar to increase/decrease the article size:

The fact that a bot summarises the main ideas and we’ll only focus on this extraction can also be biased. How to make sure that we’re not relying on just one side of the story? Can this artificial intelligence services be unbiased? This study provides food for thought.

Read more about the project here. A feature coming soon is the multi-document summarisation!

This project is collected under the Master of Innovation in Journalism in Elche (Spain).

Andrés Jiménez presents Facterbot as the first fact-checker chatbot on Facebook Messenger that helps to detect false stories on the internet. You can subscribe to occasional notifications, read a summary within the app or click on a call to action button to know more about it.

Great initiative to detect what’s being viral on social media, check it and spread it throughout the audience. Being proactive when needed and silent when there’s nothing else to share, it gives the user a break from bots that are continuously messaging you about the weather, news or jokes.

As a guided dialogue bot, it has limitations on the natural language understanding. It lacks of some small talks out of ‘hello’, ‘who are you’ or ‘I need help’, where the bot replies with the default fallback answer: ‘Sorry, I don’t quite understand what you are saying. Please scroll back up and continue the conversation.’

Know more about how Facterbot works here, by Andrés.

Do you know more examples? Let me know in the comments or at @mcrosasb