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)

Stemmers


Sometimes, it is useful to find the root or stem of a word. In the English language, irregular verb conjugations are not uncommon. By deducing the root of a verb, we can dramatically decrease the amount of calculations needed to find the action of the phrase. Take the verb searching for example; for the purpose of bots, it would be much easier to process the verb in its root form search. Here, a stemmer can help us determine said root. Replace the contents of index.js with the following to demonstrate stemmers:

'use strict';

// import the natural library
const natural = require('natural');

const Bot = require('./Bot');

// initialize the stemmer
const stemmer = natural.PorterStemmer;

// attach the stemmer to the prototype of String, enabling
// us to use it as a native String function
stemmer.attach();

const bot = new Bot({
  token: process.env.SLACK_TOKEN,
  autoReconnect: true,
  autoMark: true
});

// respond to any message that comes through
bot.respondTo('', (message, channel...