+++
title = "Fun Links 2016-04-15"
categories = ["Fun links"]
date = 2016-04-15T18:13:20Z
tags = ["service"]
+++
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](https://telegram.org/), 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.
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