Book Image

Building Slack Bots

Book Image

Building Slack Bots

Overview of this book

Slack promises that its users will "be less busy." Slack bots interact with users in Slack chatrooms, providing useful immediate information, and automating work. This book gives you everything you need to build powerful and useful Slack bots. You’ll see how to hook into the Slack API to create software that can read and post to chatrooms, respond to commands and hints given in natural conversational language, and build fun and useful bots for your own place of work, both as a front end to your own service and to distribute and share as apps. You can even sell your bots and build a business as a Slack bot developer. Throughout the book, you’ll build useful and fun example applications that you can modify for your own situations. These range from simple, fun applications to liven up discussions to useful, data-driven apps to help you make decisions quickly and manage work.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Chapter 5. Understanding and Responding to Natural Language

We've built bots that can play games, store data, and provide useful information. The next step isn't information gathering, it's processing. This chapter will introduce natural language processing (NLP) and show how we can use it to enhance our bots even further.

In this chapter, we will cover:

  • A brief introduction to natural language

  • A Node implementation

  • Natural language processing

  • Natural language generation

  • Displaying data in a natural way