BUILD A MESSENGER BOT

A part of Hack the Castle 2018

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About Cetrez

 

Cetrez is a digital innovation company.

 

We exist to accelerate our clients’ advantage in their digital journey.

 

Hack The Castle

Part of Cetrez Academy

hack.cetrez.com

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Todays agenda

 

  • Getting started with bot development
  • What makes a bot good
    • Common patterns and gotchas
  • Make your bot smarter with NLP/NLU AI
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Getting started

 

  • Messenger Platform
    • Step by step Wizard
  • Set up a page
    • Unpublished for testing
  • Test out the node example
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Local tunnel

Handle the frequent crashes

#!/usr/bin/env sh

DEFAULT_DOMAIN="$USER-$HOSTNAME"
SUBDOMAIN="${1:-$DEFAULT_DOMAIN}"
# Only lower case alpha numeric characters 
# are allowed for lt
SUBDOMAIN=$(echo $SUBDOMAIN | \
    tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | \
    tr -cd '[[:alnum:]]')

until lt --port 5000 --subdomain $SUBDOMAIN
do
    echo "# Restarting tunnel #"
    # Avoid restarts from flooding the CPU
    sleep 0.5
done
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Start building

 

  • Use the language of your choosing
    • Python for us
  • Flask based library FBMQ
  • Example server quick start
    • default.json ⇒ config.py
CONFIG = {
    'FACEBOOK_TOKEN': 'pageAccessToken',
    'VERIFY_TOKEN': 'validationToken',
    'SERVER_URL': 'https://sub.localtunnel.me'
}
{
    "appSecret": "…",
    "pageAccessToken": "…",
    "validationToken": "…",
    "serverURL": "https://sub.localtunnel.me"
}
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Stupid bot

 

  • Requires exact matches
    • Annoying!
  • Levenshtein distance
    • Built into Python
    • Rough matches
  • Fuzzy matching
    • Partial string similarity
    • Out of order tokens
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Getting fuzzy

 

from fuzzywuzzy import fuzz, process

# …

process.extractOne(
    text, 
    special_keywords.keys()
)
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Be a nice bot

Make your bot's chat interface feel more natural, don't confuse your user.

 

Exemplar: Kilian Valkhof ​
A Messenger Adventure
 
Game loop

6 things I learned

  • People send stickers
  • Users answer rhetorical questions
  • No delay feels mechanical
  • Use Quick replies
  • Set up a Dev bot
  • Get the Facebook Pages app
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Delays

 

Natural delays make gives your bot depth

 

  • Use typing indicators and read receipts 
  • Split replies
  • 30 ms / letter + random
    • Base delay on previous message if multiple
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Use quick replys

 

Guide the user towards known functions

 

  • Enhances discoverability
  • Less confusion
  • Traceable 
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Stickers

 

Your users will send stickers to your bot

 

  • Handle them as replies
  • Different sizes have their own ID
    • Three sizes
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Templates

Use templates to enable richer content replies

  • Receipt
  • Airline
    • Boarding passes
  • Media
  • Button
    • HTML, Phone, Buy
  • List
    • 2-4 items
  • Generic
    • Carousel
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AI

Train your own models

 

NLP/NLU as a Service

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rasa.ai

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wit.ai

 

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Chatfuel

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Questions?

hack.cetrez.com

Friday, February 2

18:00

Saturday February 3

08:00 – 23:00

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Build a Messenger bot

By Alexander Hultnér

Build a Messenger bot

A part of Hack The Castle 2018

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