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)

Using trained classifiers


An example classifier.json file that contains training data for weather is included with this book. For the rest of this chapter, we will assume that the file is present and that we are loading it in via the preceding method.

Replace your respondTo method call with the following snippet:

let settings = {};

bot.respondTo({ mention: true }, (message, channel, user) => {
  let args = getArgs(message.text);

  if (args[0] === 'set') {
    let place = args.slice(1).join(' ');
    settings[user.name] = place
    
    bot.send(`Okay ${user.name}, I've set ${place} as your default location`, channel);
    return;
  }

  if (args.indexOf('in') < 0 && !settings[user.name]) {
    bot.send(`Looks like you didn\'t specify a place name, you can set a city by sending \`@weatherbot set [city name]\` or by sending \`@weatherbot ${args.join(' ')} in [city name]\``, channel);
    return;
  }

  // The city is usually preceded by the word 'in'  
  let city = args.indexOf...