Thanks to an almost unrivaled feature set to help with collaboration, Slack has become a must-have for remote offices around the world. It makes communicating with team members simple and efficient, thanks (in part) to a very simple and easy-to-use interface on mobile and desktop.
It also comes with a feature that can break your productivity goals out of the park — the Slack bot (aka the Slack app). These bots help integrate other services within the Slack interface, allowing you to do everything from team planning to video calling and more. Here are seven of the best Slack bots for you to try on your Slack channel.
If you’re tired of answering the same questions over and over, think about installing askSpoke into your Slack channel. This slack bot is part chatbot, part ticket counter. The bot automatically responds with clear answers to common questions while saving more complex questions in a queue that you can answer personally.
You’ll need to add resources to askSpoke first, so there’s a bit of a setup process. Once saved, these common questions can be answered without any human interaction, saving you time and money (while keeping your co-workers happy) .
askSpoke is not free, however, with prices starting at $4 per month, per employee.
Teams on a tight budget may not be able to afford a Slack bot, but there are free Slack bots out there for you to try. One of the best Slack bots for teams is Google Calendar for Team Events, which, as the name suggests, integrates your team’s Google calendar with your Slack channel to keep track of your team’s schedule.
Weekly or daily event summaries are passed through as notifications within Slack itself, along with custom alerts for upcoming events. Any changes to your event (for example, a canceled meeting) will also be propagated to Slack, to make sure you don’t miss anything.
This slack bot is completely free to install and use. Google Calendar — one of the best online calendar services — is also free to use.
Remote workers can’t exactly raise their hands during a team meeting. To be able to test your employees, you’ll need a poll bot like Polly for your Slack channel. Polly comes with ready-made templates that you can edit for basic or complex questions. You can also design your own to save more time.
In particular, Polly is a strong choice for larger businesses. With an enhanced workflow, you can track new employees with a built-in system to automatically check in regularly and ask questions to help you catch potential issues.
It is also flexible, allowing you to use it to handle any potential IT problem like a small helpdesk for example. You can try Polly with a 14-day free trial, with plans starting at $29 a month for up to 20 employees or users.
If you are a smaller organization, you may find Polly’s features a bit complicated for your needs. That’s where Simple Poll comes in, providing a basic poll bot to ask your employees quick questions.
The name doesn’t lie, as it’s pretty simple to use — just type / poll Next is your question and potential options. For example, /poll “Do you like cheese?” “Yes no” will display a simple yes-no question, asking your users if they like cheese.
Simple Poll is free to use with some restrictions on the number of votes and polls that can be taken. The paid version has less limitations, with anonymous feedback and a response limit to get clearer answers, costs $49 a month.
Remote workers can sometimes find it difficult to build the same kind of team atmosphere that develops automatically in an office environment. Simple things, like bringing a cake to a coworker’s birthday, can be forgotten. You will never forget to celebrate those important days again when you install BirthdayBot.
BirthdayBot keeps track of birthdays in your group. Your users can share wish lists with BirthdayBot, making it easy to choose the best gifts, as well as allowing managers to automatically send birthday gift cards to employees.
It’s customizable, allowing you to set suggestions for upcoming birthdays. When the special day comes, you can set the BirthdayBot to start the celebration on certain channels. BirthdayBot starts at $0.75 a month per user, with a 14-day free trial available.
Slack is primarily a text chat platform, but there will be times when text and emojis aren’t enough to solve the problem. One of the best Slack bots for remote workers who need to share their screens and communicate via voice and video chat is Dead Simple Screen Sharing.
Dead Simple Screen Sharing requires a Chrome extension installed on your PC to be able to share your screen, although this is not required for Firefox users. Its features are simple — it allows you to share feeds from your webcam and mic as well as your computer screen to chat with other team members in real time.
An $18-a-month paid plan is available, which adds higher-resolution screen sharing, as well as mass video conferencing for up to 150 users.
Automation can tackle many time-consuming tasks in a business. Is one of the best IFTTT alternatives In the market, Zapier can be considered a must-have, allowing you to combine thousands of different services together. With Slack integration, Zapier lets you control these services directly from Slack itself.
Zapier comes with over 2,000 different apps that you can combine with Slack. You can edit Trello boards, send emails, schedule calls, post notifications — Zapier’s powerful yet easy-to-use workflow system means you can set triggers and actions for services main service without knowing a single line of code.
Zapier lets you automate 100 tasks in a month for free, on up to five “zap” (tasks). If you require more automation, expect to pay from $19.99 a month up to almost $600 a month for the largest organizations.
Build better teams with Slack
Slack is the remote office environment every team needs. With some of the best Slack bots installed, you can make Slack your second brain, keeping you and your team organized in one place.
Of course, Slack isn’t the only collaboration platform out there. You might want to consider Microsoft Teams instead, with many pros and cons to consider in Microsoft Teams vs Slack debate.
Which platform is a must in your organization and which Slack bot can’t you live without? Let us know in the comments below.
