VentureBeat's Bots Channel tracks the most important news and analysis from the exploding fields of bots and messaging. Each week, we select the top stories and present them in our free weekly newsletter, BotBeat. We include news stories by VentureBeat staff, guest articles from leading figures in the bots community, and posts from a wide variety of other outlets. You can subscribe to our BotBeat newsletter to receive this information in your inbox every Thursday.

Two and a half years ago the rise of the chatbots started. For those of you who are not yet familiar, Chatbots exist in chatting apps and used to amuse and help in various needs; send us weather and news daily digests; suggesting things to do and see; amuse us with images and gifs of cats. Unfortunately, most of the chatbots suggest unusable experience. They are'breaking' during a regular chat, they get creepy by asking for personal details with no good reasoning, they operate based on scripts and almost never improvise.

Startup founders and some members of the Bots Facebook group are accusing its creator, Matt Schlicht, of misleading them about his intentions. In May, Schlicht asked for and received more than 100 pitch decks from entrepreneurs after offering to help connect them with investors. The furor erupted this week when Schlicht launched his own bot startup, Octane AI.

Botmetrics allows bot makers to collect and act on detailed chat bot metrics with minimal code for Kik, Facebook, Slack bots. Today, we're proud to announce that we're launching Open Source Botmetrics: the first and only open source, enterprise grade, business analytics and engagement platform built for chat and voice bots.