Yahoo releases Finance, Weather, News and Pet Monkey bots on Facebook

Yahoo just announced the release of four of its content bots for Facebook. These bots have already been available on Kik. These are Yahoo Finance (@YahooFinance), Yahoo News (@YahooNews), Yahoo Weather (@YahooWeather) and Monkeys (@MonkeyPet). To start using these bots, all you have to do is open up messenger, start a new conversation, and type in the name of the bot. The weather bot allows users to specify a home city. Any location first searched for will be taken as the home city. Up to three additional cities can be added, and the weather conditions in these cities will be sent as a notification every morning by the bot. An interesting feature is that the bot pulls in images from Flickr, and overlays the local weather conditions for that place at that time. Users can add captions to these photos, and share them over social media or instant messaging clients. The pin code detection works well for India.  Yahoo News is a news aggregating bot, and the good news is that it does not use only Yahoo News as a source. The initial tiles show only the headline and an image. Interested users can request for a summary, or just dive into the piece and start reading. The links to the story open up in a new browser window. Users can search for specific news topics, or browse trending topics.  The Finance bot works with American indexes and stock exchanges. You can explore stock prices, see which ones are moving the most, and ask to see how specific companies are performing. Doing this throws up a bunch of news articles as well. Users can also set alerts for particular stocks. There is a handy button to browse through current trends.  The MonkeyPet is the most fun among all the ChatBots. It is like having a funny talking creature sitting inside your device. You can name the monkey, and interact with it using emoji. The monkey usually replies in very simple english, but at times it shows images when it gets overexcited. My pet monkey really likes Pizza. This is a very confusing bot because it is both incredibly smart and incredibly dumb at the same time.