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)

When should we use natural language generation?


Sparingly, is the answer. Consider Slackbot, Slack's own in-house bot used for setting up new users, amongst other things. Here's the first thing Slackbot says to a new user:

The humble bot

Immediately, the bot's restrictions are outlined and no attempts to hide the fact that it is not human are made. Natural language generation is at its best when used to transform data-intensive constructs such as JSON objects into easy to comprehend phrases.

The Turing Test is a famous test developed in 1950 by Alan Turing to assess a machine's ability to make itself indistinguishable from a human in a text-only sense. Like Slackbot, you should not strive to make your bot Turing Test complete. Instead, focus on how your bot can be the most useful and use natural language generation to make your bot as easy to use as possible.