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)

The uncanny valley


The uncanny valley is a term used to describe systems that act and sound like humans, but are somehow slightly off. This slight discrepancy actually leads to the bot feeling a lot more unnatural, and this is the exact opposite of what we are trying to accomplish with natural language generation. Instead, we should avoid trying to make the bot perfect in its natural language responses; the chances of finding ourselves in the uncanny valley get higher the more human-like we try to make a bot sound.

Instead, we should focus on making our bots useful and easy to use, over making its responses natural. A good principle to follow is to build your bot to be as smart as a puppy, a concept championed by Matt Jones (http://berglondon.com/blog/2010/09/04/b-a-s-a-a-p/):

"Making smart things that don't try to be too smart and fail, and indeed, by design, make endearing failures in their attempts to learn and improve. Like puppies."

Let's expand our weatherbot to make the generated response...