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.

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Building Slack Bots
Jun, 2016 | 182 pages
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Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Building Slack Bots
Building Slack Bots
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started with Slack
Getting Started with Slack
Introduction to Slack
Slack as a platform
The end goal
Summary
2
Your First Bot
Your First Bot
Preparing your environment
Basic responses
Sending a direct message
Restricting access
Debugging a bot
Summary
3
Adding Complexity
Adding Complexity
Responding to keywords
Bot commands
External API integration
Summary
4
Using Data
Using Data
Introduction to Redis
Connecting to Redis
Saving and retrieving data
Best practices
Simple to-do example
Summary
5
Understanding and Responding to Natural Language
Understanding and Responding to Natural Language
A brief introduction to natural language
Fundamentals of NLP
Tokenizers
Stemmers
String distance
Inflection
Displaying data in a natural way
When to use NLP?
Mentions
Classifiers
Using trained classifiers
Natural language generation
When should we use natural language generation?
The uncanny valley
Summary
6
Webhooks and Slash Commands
Webhooks and Slash Commands
Webhooks
Slash commands
In-channel and ephemeral responses
Using webhooks and slash commands
Summary
7
Publishing Your App
Publishing Your App
The Slack app directory
Registering your app and obtaining tokens
Understanding the OAuth process
Scopes
Submitting your app to the app directory
Monetizing your bot
Summary
Index
Index

A brief introduction to natural language

You should always strive to make your bot as helpful as possible. In all the bots we've made so far, we've awaited clear instructions via a key word from the user and then followed said instructions as far as the bot is capable. What if we could infer instructions from users without them actually providing a key word? Enter natural language processing (NLP).

NLP can be described as a field of computer science that strives to understand communication and interactions between computers and human (natural) languages.

In layman's terms, NLP is the process of a computer interpreting conversational language and responding by executing a command or replying to the user in an equally conversational tone.

Examples of NLP projects are digital assistants such as the iPhone's Siri. Users can ask questions or give commands and receive answers or confirmation in natural language, seemingly from a human.

One of the more famous projects using NLP is IBM's Watson system...

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