Bing now serves up bots from Facebook Messenger, Slack, and other chat apps

The following decades brought chatbots with names such as Parry, Jabberwacky, Dr. Sbaitso, and A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity); in 2017, Saudi Arabia granted citizenship to a humanoid robot named Sophia. In this new era of generative AI, human names are just one more layer of faux humanity on products already loaded with anthropomorphic features. The new generation of chatbots can not only converse in unnervingly humanlike ways; in many cases, they have human names too. In addition to Tessa, there are bots named Ernie (from the Chinese company Baidu), Claude (a ChatGPT rival from the AI start-up Anthropic), and Jasper (a popular AI writing assistant for brands). Many of the most advanced chatbots— ChatGPT, Bard, HuggingChat—stick to clunky or abstract identities, but there are now many new additions to the already endless customer-service bots with real names (Maya, Bo, Dom).

My name has so far evaded Silicon Valley, but I doubt it’ll be long before I end up expressing my concerns to an AI-powered Jacob. This might be because of novelty — we might become more comfortable with the virtual, more trusting of it (though this year’s headlines haven’t given us much to trust). But despite the hundreds of movies we’ve made and books we’ve written about robots, introducing personality into technology might not be the way we become more comfortable.

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Join leaders from Block, GSK, and SAP for an exclusive look at how autonomous agents are reshaping enterprise workflows – from real-time decision-making to end-to-end automation. As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York, which you can opt out of anytime. @phasechase is a linguistic game taken out of the classroom and shared on Twitter, a project by Rob Dubbin. @CensusAmericans, a FiveThirtyEight creation that uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau between 2009 and 2013 to produce mini-biographies of anonymous Americans. @poem_exe generates “micropoetry” based on a technique used by the Oulipo poet Raymond Queneau.

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The Cortana Skills Kit is now publicly available, with roughly 50 skills that can teach you how to make a Manhattan, order a pizza, or take care of a child. Customizable artificial intelligence services developed out of Microsoft Research, as well as Skype video bots and Skype chat for web pages, were also announced. A desire to create a common bot search engine is an ambition Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE Labs at Microsoft Research, first shared with VentureBeat last fall. At Build 2017, alongside a stream of news about AI, bots, and Cortana, Microsoft yesterday announced that Skype bots can now be found in Bing search results. Bots in dozens of categories, including travel, entertainment, sports, and news, can be surfaced by entering a phrase like “travel bots” or “entertainment bots” into the search box on Bing.com.

As generative AI continues to advance, expect a deluge of new human-named bots in the coming years, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a computer-science professor at Brown University, told me. The names are yet another way to make bots seem more believable and real. “There’s a difference between what you expect from a ‘help assistant’ versus a bot named Tessa,” Katy Steinmetz, the creative and project director of the naming agency Catchword, told me. These names can have a malicious effect, but in other instances, they are simply annoying or mundane—a marketing ploy for companies to try to influence how you think about their products. The future of AI may or may not involve a bot taking your job, but it will very likely involve one taking your name.

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• The new generation of chatbots can not only converse in unnervingly humanlike ways; in many cases, they have human names too.
• When Bing surfaces bot search results, each chat app platform is displayed in a dedicated area at the top of the results.
• As the resident language expert on our product design team, naming things is part of my job.

There’s a new buzzword in computer design circles every year. Thousands of Facebook Messenger, Slack, Skype, Kik, and Telegram bots can now be found by searching Bing.com, a source familiar with the matter has informed VentureBeat. @the_ephemerides pulls images from NASA’s OPUS database to pair with computer-generated text. It was only when we removed the name and took away the first person pronoun and the introduction that things started to improve.

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• Bots can either be viewed by individual platform or as an aggregate to display the best bots from all five bot platforms.
• @Mothgenerator uses Javascript to produce striking renderings of imaginary moths, and then tweets them with faux-scientific names to breathe life into them.
• Echoing requests from developers making bots for Facebook Messenger, Cheng said the biggest request she got from users of the Microsoft Bot Framework was to improve discoverability.
• When we began iterating on a bot within our messaging product, I was prepared to brainstorm hundreds of names.
• From a design perspective, bots are aligned with the whole concept of messaging-as-a-platform — we could build a bot right into our own messenger using the same simple elements we’d already designed for human-to-human conversation.

When Bing surfaces bot search results, each chat app platform is displayed in a dedicated area at the top of the results. Search for bots on Bing today and you’ll find that the selection of highlighted bots may not be the very best bots available, but it’s a start and is far more extensive than anything currently offered by other chat apps. In the last few years, artists and programmers have turned Twitter bots into an internet-native art form, producing bots that are often hilarious, usually weird, and sometimes unexpectedly poetic. But names don’t trigger an action in text-based bots, or chatbots. Even Slackbot, the tool built into the popular work messaging platform Slack, doesn’t need you to type “Hey Slackbot” in order to retrieve a pre-programmed response. White Castle’s Julia, which simply facilitates the purchase of hamburgers and fries, is no one’s idea of a sentient bot.

@Nice_tips_bot shares life advice from Wikihow to brighten your day. @Twoheadlines draws from Google News, automatically combining the subject of one headline with the action of another. Put your brand in front of 10,000+ tech and VC leaders across all three days of Disrupt 2025. Amplify your reach, spark real connections, and lead the innovation charge. Names and identity lift the tools on the screen to a level above intuition. They make us see the tool in all its virtual glory, and place it in an entirely different context to the person using it — and not always a relationship that person asks for or appreciates.

Resisting the urge to give every bot a human identity is a small way to let a bot’s function stand on its own and not load it with superfluous human connotations—especially in a field already inundated with ethical quandaries. Echoing requests from developers making bots for Facebook Messenger, Cheng said the biggest request she got from users of the Microsoft Bot Framework was to improve discoverability. Talk about a bot search engine has included partners like Slack and Facebook Messenger, Cheng said.

To be understood intuitively is the goal — the words on the screen are the handle of the hammer. As the resident language expert on our product design team, naming things is part of my job. When we began iterating on a bot within our messaging product, I was prepared to brainstorm hundreds of names. But for now, bots with human names are becoming unavoidable.