Chatbot Abilities • April 4, 2017 • Written by Dean Withey

Your Ever-Growing List of Chatbot Ideas to be Inspired

Whether you're a marketer, geek, CEO, work in sales, support or admin, here is a monster list of chatbot ideas to get your creative juices flowing.

We update the list regularly and add links to IRL chatbots and solutions.

Want to add something? Tweet @ubisend and we'll get it done. Want one of these built? Contact us and we'll make it happen. Have decided to go ahead and build of these yourself? Tweet @ubisend and tell us your story! (basically, tweet us. Please. We're lonely talking to machines all day).

Browse, discuss, share and let's work together to revolutionise how consumers and businesses communicate.

Industries (click to jump straight to whatever you like, and please, forgive my bad jokes)

B2B

Find me people

"Hi, I'm looking for a PHP developer".

"Hello ubisend, we have 6 PHP developers in the London area, want me to send you their CVs?"

You're welcome.

Don't forget to pay

How about building a chatbot that helps people deal with questions on invoices, payments and overdue reminders via Slack or SMS. Accept payment, send receipts and connect with financial services software. Hi Xero, we're available to build you something btw ;)

On-call business guru

Business to business coaching and support bot for management.

"Hi, I need to take disciplinary action on this member of staff".

Super-smart coach bot: "Oh dear, sorry to hear that, here's our top 10 tips on disciplinary interviews".

Startup mentor

The AI-driven expert who's been there and done it. Answering questions, pointing out to relevant resources and taking bookings to charge £10,000 per hour consultancy.

Is my speling good? (cwidt?)

Send this chatbot an email, or a report. Hey presto, it comes back better.

Pocket lawyer

NDAs, privacy policies and any other documents required. Or get answers to important legal questions and advice on whether you should sign something. How's this... take a picture of the document on your phone, it wizzes off to a lawyer, they read it and send back a thumbs up.

Credit: Business Insider

For when things need to be done, like proper

A conversational bot to help make sure staff are doing the correct thing over and over again (particularly important when your company is legally bound to ask the same questions, get the same IDs, etc.). The chatbot can even record all the data and documents to sling it at a database somewhere.

B2C

Ask me anything

You mean, you still have real humans dealing with queries and complaints? Can an AI-driven customer service chatbot instantly remove 80% of inbound customer service queries? (FYI, yes)

Where's my stuff?

Ditch those SMS "You package is out for delivery... yawn" messages. Deliver a chatbot that says "You should have got your package, did it arrive ok?". Turn boring into a conversation, get feedback, NPS and upsell.

I want to ask you this question (again)

No matter how talented, funny and word-smart your copywriting, FAQs are dull. Who really wants to sit and read through tonnes of stuff to get to an answer? Yeah, no one. Use AI and NLP to turn that FAQ into a conversation. "Hi, my computer is broken". "Hello, did you turn if off and on again?".

Credit: IT crowd

A personal shopper for all, at once

How about an on-site AI-driven personal shopper that helps people through the buyer journey? It simply asks what they're looking for, talks about the options, benefits and all that jazz. Then deep links them straight to the products that best match what they want.

Don't let them go

Someone just bought your stuff, awesome. You realise it's cheaper to make them buy something else rather than trying to find someone new? (If you didn't you should read this) How about some customer service?

"How was the product", "Did it get to you ok", or "Can you tell us how we did" type stuff.

Have no fear, AI and chatbots can save your poor little humans from doing it.

Education

Do your homework

(Disclaimer: kids, school is important. Go to school). A chatbot that delivers lessons, lectures, course material (like real downloadable stuff) to students before/during/after lessons. Do your teaching staff still tell kids to write their homework for that night into their workbook? How 1990s. Send them an FB Message, or a Snapchat of the homework brief.

Get better at teaching

Teachers want to get better at teaching, right? How about a feedback chatbot? "Lecture all done, how did I do?", type thing. It would take a brave lecturer. Perhaps you'll need to wrap it up with some other features, like the ability for students to send questions to the lecturer in real-time, or to save the lecturer's notes?

Welcome to uni

It's a big deal. Sudden responsibility for washing your pants, putting food in your mouth and dealing with those underarms. How about a nice friendly, student-y language level chatbot to help people get settled into university. It can even talk about mental and sexual health and do some good in the world too. Universities worldwide are adopting this approach and using chatbots, read more: Why Universities are Using Chatbots: The Future of Higher Education.

Events

An overwhelmingly amazing event

You're running an event and probably want three main things to happen.

1 - people come to it,

2 - people know wtf is going on when they're at it, and,

3 - you market to people when it's over to get them to come back next year/month w.e.

How about a chatbot that does this? Promotional stuff to build hype, alerts during to tell people their expensive cold food is ready and then spams them afterwards with replays and "OMG SUPER EARLY JUST OUT OF THE EGG TICKETS FOR NEXT YEAR" (disclaimer: I may have had bad experiences at events in my past).

Financial Services

How much money don't I have?

Why can't I just ask my AI assistant how much money I don't have? Why do I have to pick up a phone, hit some random never-remember passcode and then speak some random never-remember secret password? (FYI, it's your mother's maiden name.) Smash out a personal banking chatbot to stay up-to-date with your savings, current and credit accounts.

Cash, what's that?

A nice niche chatbot that helps you to request or send bitcoins to buy stuff, pay back friends or invest (disclaimer: I have never used bitcoins before, you probably need to check I didn't just have a dream this is possible.)

Government

Good enough for Barack

Talk to your council, government, country representatives via a chatbot. Tell them they suck, and your tax is too high, or, here's a better idea... tell them some better ways of getting stuff done and perhaps they'll give you money. First things first, build a chatbot that connects important people with us regular ol' folk.

Walking backwards

Monday morning at 8 am - you usually find me walking back to my house to put my bins out because I forgot, again. Why, in 2017, is there not a chatbot that sends me a message to remind me to put it out. FYI, this would be a pretty useless bot, you'd probably best wrapping it up with other useful stuff like, hmmm, feed the cat, tell me the bird seed has run out, pay the electric bill and other useful bits and bobs (disclaimer: I don't think I've seen a bird table API).

Need more? Grab 'Leveraging Chatbots in the Public Sector'.

Health & Wellness

Will I die chatbot? (Might want to re-think the name...)

Doctor's waiting rooms A.K.A plague-prisons-full-of-oldies. Who wants to go there? Check out OneStop's Health's chatbot for ideas on how you can check symptoms, give medical advice and get people help with a chatbot.

Fitness tracker conversation

Think of all the people around the world with things on their wrist and phones in their pocket collecting data. Get rid of bar charts, line graphs and complicated interfaces by developing a chatbot that allows people to ask their tracker how far they walked today, or what their average heart rate is.

Take a minute

Get ready for the buzzword of 2015. Mindfulness. Roll-out out a chatbot for people to remind them to take a break, deliver audio and video meditation, stretching. You can call it "get-out-of-your-chair-you-lazy-g*t-chatbot". Someone may have beaten you to it.

Friendly friend

If you're good enough at AI, go ahead, create 'Her' and cure loneliness. When you've made your billions, remember where you read this and throw me a few mill.

Credit: Her (2013)

Get your ass off the couch

Motivational messaging, rich media fitness programs with audio and video instructional guides. Connect with a fitness trainer in real time, buddy up with other people getting off the couch. One chatbot with a billion different skinned cats.

Healthcare

Pollution alerts or warnings

Live in one of those cities where you can hardly see where you're walking? Be a hero, deliver a chatbot that tells people when to put a bag over their head (disclaimer: don't put a bag over your head, it affects breathing).

Suncare

UVA this, UVB that. Who knows? Why not save people's skin with guides, tips and alerts on super-sunny days? Here's your first customer:

Credit: those people over at Marvel.

Look out for the oldies

Do not attempt to trick parents/grandparents/the older generation into thinking they're talking to you, when it's your AI-driven chatbot (been there, got complicated...). But, why not get a little alert when Granny doesn't take her pills, or the front door of the house has not opened for the last couple of days?

Doctor-on-demand (lol, you wish... yes, I'm looking at you NHS)

Lots of private medical practices are springing up (about a billion times more in you're in the USA). How about on-demand medical booking service? Find the nearest doctor, get a rundown of what you need and get seen, perhaps even via video.

Take your pills, or face death (working title...)

Tell a bot what pills you should be taking, and it reminds you to do it. For all you Ray Kurzweil's out there, it can even send a handy picture of what pill to take.

Diabetes/chronic health helper

Record blood sugar levels, track food/calorie intake and report back to medical staff and/or family. I know at least 13 people who would use this right away. In fact, I'm going to race you to launch.





Hotels & Tourism

Where can I crash*? (*change title based on clientele)

(Probably only relevant if you own like 100 hotels, but...) "I need a hotel in Sweden from 1st June to the 27th June". "Hi, we've got two properties in Sweden, here's the link to view and book".

Where's my black pudding?

A chatbot that's basically Trip Advisor via conversation (if you do this and Trip Advisor comes after you, it's totally not my fault). You want to find the best-rated boutique hotel that serves black pudding for breakfast, and it comes back with options and links to read/book.

Have a life

You've saved up all your pennies and want a nice break. Apparently, the world is quite big (what do I know, I just stare at my monitor all day), where in the world do you go? How about a lovely conversation with a machine that learns the type of adrenaline-inducing stuff you do and makes recommendations (FYI, apparently, the answer is always New Zealand).

Nonprofit

Up-to-date and donate

A chatbot that keeps supporters engaged, taking them on a journey of understanding your cause and things you've done to help. Why not slip in a little "Please help us by donating" message and take payment, too?

Give me your time

Lots of charities, NGOs and nonprofits want people's time, not just their money. Why not roll out a solution that lets people commit a time and date to pick up litter, paint fences, teach or whatever else the nonprofit needs? Connect to a master calendar, sync everyone's time and save the world.

Publishing

I want it NOW

We now live in an on-demand economy (btw - I parp on about this all the time, read my stuff on Huffington Post). Why sit and smash out content all day and hope someone pops onto your website to read it? Use a chatbot and messaging apps to say.

"Hi, tell me what you want, and I'll send it directly to your phone".

How does an 84% read and 53% click rate sound? You're welcome.

Real Estate

Find me a house

"I'm looking for a house near London, min 3 beds and max 1.2 mill"

"We have two properties you'd like, here's the link to them on our website."

Hi Rightmove, I'm available.

Recreation & Leisure

Emergency beautifying

Find the nearest place to get your nails done, hair chopped or knots out of your shoulders, see availability, pictures and all that jazz. Book and go. Your chatbot can be niche, location or branded, and earn a commission from every sale.

Credit: Tammy Tally / Pinterest

Take a chill-pill

Your desk is covered in paper, unread emails = 2,215 and that annoying voice of your boss is draining your mana. Yes, you need a "chill-bot" that knows what you like, and on-demand tells you how to relax. If you tell it you have two days off, it might recommend a lovely book and a lay-in. Tell it you have ten minutes and it will give you some breathing exercises. How to do this? No clue. I'm just the ideas man.

Show me cultural stuff

For most people reading this, culture probably happens when you go back to Ogrimmar. Apparently, bear with me here, most humans sometimes like to go out IRL and see old or well coloured-in stuff. How about you build a way for them to find stuff like that around their current location?

These shoes are made for walking

Like going outside? Who does that? I reckon there would be a few people who'd like a chatbot that helps them find a lovely walk, like, in the hills, near a river, through a field or whatever. You could do geeky stuff like ping for their location, hit a weather API and sling maps to their phone screen.

Retail

A face to the company

Opening times, availability, in-stock, history of the company, returns policy and everything else a shop has to talk about. Package all this up into a conversational chatbot. Slap on their logo, call their CEO and show them what you've done. Next step, retirement.

Group shopping

In my man-world, this happens all the time (disclaimer: you might want to do you own market research). Girls are chatting away in a group chat. One of them says "I NEED NEW SHOES FOR FRIDAY". Someone invites your group shopper bot into the conversation. They all destroy the bot with their requirements. It calmly talks to them, finds out what they need and sends them links to where to buy some lovely sparkly shoes (which may, or may not, be affiliate links 😍 )

Personal shopping

Crawl a shop's product feed, do some AI-stuff to figure out what it all is. Then quickly spin up a bespoke high-end personal shopper for brands. People talk to the bot, discuss the intricacies of leather vs. suede and then buy stuff. You win. (FYI - ubisend's personal shopper bot does this with other bits and bobs that make it approximately 10,000,000 times better. Talk to us, like, seriously, contact us now.)

Software and Internet

What is my software doing?

You've just finished up some spangly new software for your client. How amazing would it be if the interface to that software was a conversation? How is traffic to my blog today? Did that shipment to Acme go out on time? How many outstanding invoices do we have out? You get the idea...

Transportation & Storage

Connected-to-everything

The IoT is here. With sensors and data strangling the world, why don't you add some more and create a bot for tracking people, packages and storage systems? Heck, you might even want it to talk to a human and let them know what the machines have been up to.

Travel

Flight check-in

Losing boarding cards, fighting to see flight times on the world's smallest screen with 2,000 people elbowing you in the face and rushing to the correct gate. How 2015. Follow KLM's lead and dominate with a chatbot that helps get your customers to their location safely, and on time (apparently this is every airline's motto).

Flight finder

Ask questions, give answers. Find the cheapest, next available and best flight for your journey. Boring, but I'm sure there are 100,000 people who would use it.

Flight tracker

Did granny get home safely from the Costa del Sol? Why not build a chatbot that can tell you where a flight is in real time. Set alerts for when it takes off, lands and the stewards are serving coffee (there's an API for that right?)

Company travel assistant

Big company with lots of employees? HR spending lots of time organising travel? Make their life easier by removing the burden with a company travel booking bot.

Did any of these chatbot ideas get you giddy with excitement? Imagine the cost saving, additional revenue, PR, honour, worship, etc.

Some of these you can whip up using a 'Wordpress'-esque one-size-fits-all chatbot development platform (Google it, there's like 10,000,000 of them).

When you've tried that and found they can't do what you need, get in contact with our geeks; they're like the supermen of AI-geeks. Minus muscles and good looks, oh, and laser vision. But, we do promise always to tell the truth.