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12 Bots to Integrate in Slack Today

Slack is a growing platform for productivity and entertainment bots. Learn more about 12 popular bots you can add to your Slack today to share statistics, create polls, set meetings, connect withe new colleagues, and have some fun with gifs.

Slack took the office world by storm following its 2013 launch. Now that the collaboration tool is firmly entrenched, available integrations and apps are growing exponentially, including chatbots, or bots. Like Slack itself, the bots you’ll find there can be used for many things, from serious output to collaborative processes to lighthearted bonding. Here are a few of our favorite Slackbots.

Get work done

1. Tomatobot

If you’ve tried and failed to institute a productivity technique in your solo work schedule, Tomatobot might be a game changer for you. This bot will keep the clock for you, reminding you when 25 minutes are up, and give you a place to record distractions during work periods so you can return to them later. Tell the bot when you’re starting work and when you’ve completed a task. Bonus: With all your tasks recorded here, it’s easy to review what you’ve done in team meetings (or on your own).

2. Statsbot

Statsbot integrates with multiple analytics tools, including Google Analytics, Mixpanel, SQL, Stripe, and Salesforce, to give everyone on the team an easy way to get an analytics update. The bot provides easy data access, without having to go into your tool and find it manually—and even shows charts. Not only does this bot make it easier for the analytics team to give colleagues updates, but also it empowers non-analytics workers to get the info they want, without the challenge of navigating the tool’s user interface.

3. Paperbot

For many teams, links are flying around on Slack all day long. And sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all the information being circulated. Paperbot can help. It organizes shared links and sends you a digest (daily or weekly—your choice). You can even tell it to ignore certain kinds of links. You’re also able to search the collected links for specific pieces of content by keywords or by who shared it.

4. Meekan

Filling one function of a personal assistant, Meekan will help you schedule meetings with coworkers. Invite the bot into any Slack channel and tell it whom you need to schedule a meeting with. Meekan will look at everyone’s schedule, find available times, and suggest those times within the Slack channel. Attendees vote, and then you tell the bot to book the meeting. Everyone gets an invitation—and you get none of the back and forth. You no longer need to take the time to analyze multiple calendars. This bot is particularly useful for teams working in different time zones.

5. AceBot.ai

One of the beautiful things about Slackbots is that they simplify your tasks by reducing the number of tools or systems you need to navigate. AceBot.ai brings project management capabilities to Slack—it can assign and manage tasks, create to-do lists, and track project or travel expenses. Although there are other bots designed for specific tasks, Ace compiles many capabilities into one place.

Take a break

6. Giphy

Why use words when a picture will suffice? We sometimes wonder how many offices have Slack channels that are secretly overrun by GIFs because of Giphy. This bot will insert a GIF from “the world's largest GIF library.” Be warned, however, that the same term can produce different GIFs, and you won’t know ahead of time which GIF will appear. To avoid embarrassing yourself or offending your colleagues, you may want to test your hashtags out on a private channel a few times first.

7. Lunch Train

Lunch Train is like Meekan for lunch plans. Start a group outing by typing /lunchtrain. The bot will send invitations to other users, giving them the option to board the train (or get off the train, if something changes). The organizer is notified every time someone joins, everyone who’s in for lunch gets notified when it’s time to go, and the entire Slack channel won’t be overloaded with messages about going out for lunch. Need to postpone those plans? Push a button, and the bot will tell everyone.

8. Donut

A dream for office culture promoters everywhere, the Donut bot randomly pairs two people in the office and suggests they meet for coffee. Everyone in the bot’s channel will be paired via direct message (which includes the bot), and the bot won’t repeat any pairs until all the possible pairings have been made. Donut will remind the pair to organize something if they don’t remember on their own. This bot is helpful in fostering a sense of community at work, integrating new hires, creating cross-departmental communication, and heading off the formation of office cliques.

9. GameMonk

When you need a mental break, but Facebook isn’t the answer, try the GameMonk bot. Most available games are designed for groups, so you can invite your colleagues to play. The bot offers games such as Categories, in which you name as many items in a given category as you can in 60 seconds, or Giphy, where you guess what hashtag is associated with a particular GIF. Another favorite game is Trivia, which serves up multiple choice questions. This is an excellent alternative to solo breaks from work or video game breaks with coworkers.

Have fun while working

10. Diggbot

Rather than using an RSS feed to curate your daily reads, let a bot do the work. Diggbot uses all the curating power of Digg—which aggregates 10 million RSS feeds and collects 40 million link-containing tweets a day—to deliver trending content and articles on topics you want to read. Among other options, you can get a twice-daily collection of links, or you can search for content to read by topic or publisher.

11. Humblebot

Sometimes it’s hard to be nice at work. Maybe you didn’t get enough sleep, you have a big deadline looming, or you just don’t like your job very much. Humblebot will help you to rebalance and to be kind to your co-workers by sending you a suggestion every morning to do something day that promotes humility. A couple of examples include, “Send someone a thank you note today,” and, “Use the response ‘I’d be honored’ when someone asks you to help them or do something with them today.” Multiple studies have found a link between gratitude and well-being, and we think this bot is onto something.

12. Polly

Real-time information requests are more likely to get responses and, according to Polly, offering a survey in Slack boosts participation rates by more than 30 percent versus email or web. With this bot, you can quickly create single- or multiple-question polls and even schedule recurring polls. Polly has all kinds of productivity uses like reaching consensus on a decision or getting feedback on a project, you could also use the bot to find out what kind of music people want to hear on Friday afternoon or where to host the holiday party. The bot tracks trends, segments poll data and offers built-in survey templates on different topics.