Bots everywhere! Conversational and chat-enabled apps are well positioned to become the next big platform and how apps are developed. Advances in machine learning, natural conversational APIs have taken off and many high tech and software giants are embracing conversational bots and provide APIs that allow developers to create applications that seamlessly integrate into these conversational platforms, enhancing user’s experience. This book explores some of these platforms in and simple and intuitive way, allowing developers to quickly come up to speed with them.
Chapter 1 , The Rise of Bots – Getting the Message Across, introduces and explains the growing importance of bots in today’s world and also teaches you how to create an SMS bot app using the Twilio messaging platform.
Chapter 2 , Getting Skype to Work for You, explains how to use the new Microsoft Bot Framework in order to create a Skype bot.
Chapter 3 , Twitter as a Flight Information Agent, teaches you how to create a Twitter bot application that interacts with the Air France KLM API in order to retrieve flight details.
Chapter 4 , A Slack Quote Bot, explains how to create a Slack bot application that sends inspirational quotes to users.
Chapter 5 , Telegram-Powered Bots, shows you how to develop a bot that will provide you the sentiments of messages on Telegram using Telegram APIs.
Chapter 6 , BotKit – Document Manager Agent for Slack, teaches you how to use Slack APIs with BotKit to provide documents at the fingertips of team members collaborating in Slack.
Chapter 7 , Facebook Messenger Bot, Who's Off – A Scheduler Bot for Teams, shows you how to set up a Facebook Messenger Bot that can be used to schedule team meetings, or to see who is off when with the help of the Microsoft Azure platform and services.
Chapter 8 , A Bug-Tracking Agent for Teams, teaches you how to use the IRC platform and DocumentDB for a bug-tracking bot.
Chapter 9 , A Kik Salesforce CRM Bot, explores how to use Force.com API and a Kik to create a Salesforce CRM Bot.
The following requirements are recommended for maximum enjoyment:
A good Internet connection
A fairly modern computer or laptop (preferably Windows-based, but not necessarily)
A fairly good dose of creativity, imagination, and willingness to learn and explore new concepts
Pretty much all software and APIs mentioned in this book are free of charge and can be downloaded from the Internet.
This book is for anyone that knows some Node.js and would like to explore how a bot can be written with the various existing conversational platforms available today. The book is written in an easy-to-understand way that is suitable for developers of all kinds, from novice to very experienced ones. Some know-how of Node.js is recommended.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The session object contains the information that Skype passes on to the bot app, which describes the session data that has been received and from whom. Notice that the session object contains properties such as message and text."
A block of code is set as follows:
bot.dialog('/', function (session) {
if (session.message.text.toLowerCase().indexOf('hi') >= 0){
session.send('Hi ' + session.message.user.name +
' thank you for your message: ' + session.message.text);
} else{
session.send('Sorry I dont understand you...');
}
});Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
mkdir telegrambot cd telegrambot
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Register a bot option in order to create and register your Skype bot. Once you've done that, you'll see the following screen:"
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