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)

Summary


In this chapter, we discussed what NLP is and how it can be leveraged to make a bot seem far more complex than it really is. By using these techniques, natural language can be read, processed, and responded to in equally natural tones. We also covered the limitations of NLP and understood how to differentiate between good and bad uses of NLP.

In the next chapter, we will explore the creation of web-based bots, which can interact with Slack using webhooks and slash commands.