BOTS! While the picture that forms in your head may vary when you hear that word, I suspect before too long it may become as common a term as social media is now. There is a proliferation of messaging bots at the moment. And as you may guess, that means a large number of services are popping up to enable the simple and convenient hosting, development and maintenance of your bots.
The following are a sample of such services with various takes on the issue. Some even allow you to piece together a bot without any programming. We certainly have come a long way since the Eggdrop IRC bots of 20+ years ago.
Chatfuel
https://chatfuel.com/
Chatfuel gives you the tools to build your bots without needing to program. You can hook up your data and leverage existing modules to create a bot to engage your customers. At the moment, it only supports Telegram, but more providers are on the way.
Meya
https://meya.ai/
Meya is another bot host/platform which allows you to write your bots in Python and Node.js. It also has some built-in bot components. It also has integrations with other sites like Facebook and Trello to provide information to your bot in addition to a local datastore.
Microsoft Bot Framework
https://dev.botframework.com/
Microsoft is also jumping on the messaging bandwagon, with their Bot Framework. You can build your bots with Node.js or C#, and their SDK is open source. It provides connectors to SMS, Office 365 mail, Skype, Slack, and others.
There are no comments available on this site. If you want to respond then you can write your own blog article and send me the link via twitter. If there is an issue with this article or the site in general, you can open an issue on Github