Back in 2016, the early days for chatbot. I read lot and lots of articles in medium saying the future of apps is chatbots which at the time I totally believe it. So I try it out. I make my own chatbot and convince my friends to use it. It was easy to get people to try it out, but I never really got users who stay and use it for long term. Now 3 years have passed, I’m the only one user who still using it. If anyone ever told you that chatbot is the future, it’s a lie and it will never be true. The future is always Omni-channel.
For me, chatbot, is a really great UI for users to interact with and at the same time it’s pretty easy for me to code and develop new features. It’s like a web and app combining together. In this article, I will show you more than 15 features of my LINE chatbot that I use as a tool to make my life a whole lot easier. Most of them are made from public APIs that available in the market. So with a few lines of code I can turn it into a chatbot.
1. The boring bot as a friend
This one is pretty straightforward. A bot that can talk to you and reply to you in a natural context. The bot can even remember your name for 30 min if you tell it. Basically it can reply you with whatever you say and it looks like a real human reply. I set this as a default process when the bot cannot recognize the command user sent. This is also the first feature that users always get to try because they will just randomly type anything and send it.
API: pandorabots.com
2. Web/image search
I was so bored to switch between apps just to search something, and copy the link, then send a message. So I wanted a bot that can let me do all the searching within the chat app itself. Sometimes it’s really useful when you are in a chat group and you want to search and see the result with your friends.
- search [keyword] page [no.] -> to search for websites
- img [keyword] count [no.] page [no.] -> to search images
One thing to be note for image search, I have to add a word censorship after I added the bot into a group of my friends who are all men.
API: Bing web search (broken)
3. Thai/English/Japanese translation
I use this feature quite a lot when I don’t know some difficult words. Recently I also use it to study Japanese because they have Kanji, Hiragana, Romanji and the meaning you have to look for.
I also put my bot in a group of my Japanese colleague which it will translate Japanese messages to English and send to another group which all foreigners are in. Even though LINE has a translate bot but it’s quite annoying because it translate all messages and send to the same group which really use up all the space on your screen.
API: Bing Microsoft Translater, jisho.org (JP)
4. URL Shortener
API: Google URL Shortener
5. Random numbers
When you can’t decide on something, just random it. You can use a bot to random just True/False or random a number from a specify range.
6. Calculation/Facts search
Faster and smarter than Google, of course it’s Wolframalpha. I used to use it a lot during the time I study Calculus. I figured they also have an API too, so it’s a must to put this feature in my chatbot.
API: wolframalpha.com
7. Random a color palette
You have to make a HTML website and you don’t know what color to use. Just random it and tell me the HEX code too.
API: colourlovers.com
8. Reminder
Yep, that’s what it does. It’s nice to have your own reminder with just one message and no need to go to Calendar/reminder app and do the setting.
API: easycron.com (Free plan limits 100 requests/day, must renew every 30 days) (broken)
9. Track EMS package
This is the best feature among all of the features I guess. Just send a tracking ID to the bot and whenever there is an update, it will send you a message. Most of the users use my chatbot specifically for this feature. I even expand it to Facebook messenger bot which I named it EMSTrace. I got almost 100 users per day but after a while the API was broken and I couldn’t find a revenue model for it. So I fixed the API by creating my own web scraping script, publishing it and move on.
10. Weather radar/satellite image
I was pretty into the weather and want to know how much it’s gonna rain. The code is pretty easy just get the image url from the website and change the date and time.
11. Weather notification / Rain alert
I’m lazy to check a weather app and sometimes the forecast is always changing. So I set a cronjob to check the weather from multiple sources and send me a message in the morning if it will rain on that day. Also, send me an update if the forecast is changed.
API: DarkSky, WNI
12. Youtube search
Ever want to find what song you’re hearing or send a youtube mv link to your friend? Youtube search is really nice you don’t need to type the full name of the song, just some part of the lyrics also work perfect.
13. Random Thai ID
If you are Thai, you probably know this. You need it when you making an online game account.
14. Tweet to twitter
14.1 Message log
This is not really a feature. Rather it’s a logging system for me. No need for database or anything. Just log everything by tweeting to a twitter account. Bad for privacy though.
15. Web screenshot
So my mobile data plan is free for using a chat app. Using this feature I don’t even need to surf the web. Just let the bot convert it to an image for me.
Source: https://github.com/automatethatshit/chrome-headless-screenshot-api (broken)
16. Speech to text (Google Home + IFTTT + LINE notify)
When you are lazy to type, just speak to your Google home and let IFTTT do the trick and send the message to LINE.
Note that this feature is only available for me though.
17. Image to text
Useful when you have a long text paper but you want a word file without typing it yourself.
API: Google Cloud Vision API (broken)
Second bot: Chayen (Thai tea)
The second bot that I made is just to try out new UI buttons(rich menus) that LINE release a year later. The bot has simple 4 features which work by just touching a button and no need to type.
- Check current weather condition
- Random Fortune teller message
- Check Bangkok PM2.5 pollution
- Text voicemail — basically you leave a message for the next person who chat with the bot.
Why don’t I make it public
- Cost is too high
My chatbot is based in LINE app because most people in Thailand use it. As you can see in the price plan. it’s too expensive. For free plan, you can have your chatbot with 50 friends limit. It’s good as a developer to try itout. But if your bot get famous and you want more people to add it, you have to go with the Pro plan which allow Messaging API(Push API) and cost 32,400 yen/month or around 9,200 Baht/month. It’s a big jump for me. I could have go with Facebook messenger bot instead which is totally free with unlimited number of users.
2. No market fit
I couldn’t find a market fit for this project. What I learned is a chatbot is great for doing specific task or sending notifications but it’s not good for doing multiple tasks because it will confuse the user. And that specific task that will get me more than 1,000 users, I haven’t found one.
By that, I would like to end this article here. I hope you will get some ideas of what you can do with chatbot as a maker or as a business owner who want to utilize chatbot as a new channel for your company.
