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  • Book Overview & Buying Building Slack Bots
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Building Slack Bots

Building Slack Bots

By : Paul Asjes
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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
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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
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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

When to use NLP?

It might be tempting to have weatherbot listen to and process all messages sent in the channel. This immediately poses some problems:

  • How do we know if the message sent is a query on the weather or is completely unrelated?

  • Which geographic location is the query about?

  • Is the message a question or a statement? For example, the difference between Is it cold in Amsterdam and It is cold in Amsterdam.

Although an NLP-powered solution to the preceding questions could probably be found, we have to face facts: it's likely that our bot will get at least one of the above points wrong when listening to generic messages. This will lead the bot to either provide bad information or provide unwanted information, thus becoming annoying. If there's one thing we need to avoid at all costs, it's a bot that sends too many wrong messages too often.

Here's an example of a bot using NLP and completely missing the point of the message sent:

A clearly misunderstood message

If a bot were to often mistake...

CONTINUE READING
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Tech Concepts
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Programming languages
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