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  • Book Overview & Buying Building Slack Bots
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Building Slack Bots

Building Slack Bots

By : Paul Asjes
3 (2)
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Building Slack Bots

Building Slack Bots

3 (2)
By: Paul Asjes
Buy this Book

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 (9 chapters)
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Preface
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Preface
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What this book covers
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What you need for this book
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Who this book is for
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Conventions
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Reader feedback
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Customer support
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1
1. Getting Started with Slack
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1. Getting Started with Slack
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Introduction to Slack
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Slack as a platform
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The end goal
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Summary
2
2. Your First Bot
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2. Your First Bot
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Preparing your environment
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Basic responses
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Sending a direct message
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Restricting access
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Debugging a bot
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Summary
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3. Adding Complexity
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3. Adding Complexity
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Responding to keywords
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Bot commands
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External API integration
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Summary
4
4. Using Data
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4. Using Data
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Introduction to Redis
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Connecting to Redis
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Saving and retrieving data
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Best practices
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Simple to-do example
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Summary
5
5. Understanding and Responding to Natural Language
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5. Understanding and Responding to Natural Language
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A brief introduction to natural language
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Fundamentals of NLP
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Tokenizers
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Stemmers
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String distance
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Inflection
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Displaying data in a natural way
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When to use NLP?
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Mentions
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Classifiers
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Using trained classifiers
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Natural language generation
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When should we use natural language generation?
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The uncanny valley
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Summary
6
6. Webhooks and Slash Commands
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6. Webhooks and Slash Commands
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Webhooks
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Slash commands
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In-channel and ephemeral responses
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Using webhooks and slash commands
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Summary
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7. Publishing Your App
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7. Publishing Your App
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The Slack app directory
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Registering your app and obtaining tokens
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Understanding the OAuth process
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Scopes
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Submitting your app to the app directory
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Monetizing your bot
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Summary
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Index
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Index

External API integration

Eternal APIs are third-party services hosted outside of our bot structure. These come in many varying types and are used to solve many different problems, but their use in tandem with bots follows the same data flow structure.

External API integration

The API call data flow structure between Slack, bot, and API service

We will build an example bot with API integration using a common and free-to-use API, namely that of the Wikimedia foundation.

Note

Be warned that while many APIs are free, there are many that charge when a certain amount of requests are made. Always check whether there is a fee before incorporating them into your bots.

The Wikimedia foundation API is an example of a representational state transfer (REST) service, which communicates using standard Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) protocols such as GET or POST. Many RESTful services require you to transmit a token along with your request, ensuring security and for monetizing the service by tracking the amount of requests made...

CONTINUE READING
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Tech Concepts
36
Programming languages
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