Build a Bot That Tells Your Story

Originally published on Medium.

Meet WilBot, my personal bot. Robot image lovingly created by Robohash.org.

I’ve wanted to build a simple bot ever since Facebook announced the Messenger Platform earlier this year. There are so many new cool bots out there on Twitter, Facebook, Slack channels, Telegram, and others that I finally decided it was time to write my own.

I came across Olabot, a startup by Esther Crawford focused on making personal resume bots. This is a fascinating concept (can’t wait to see their final product), and it got me inspired to build a similar concept of my personal bot.

I developed WilBot as this learning exercise. It tells you stuff about me but I left the code flexible enough to support other actions in the future. Although very simple, it was fun and challenging to think about all the use cases you have to consider when building a messaging bot. Users can type anything at any time, so expect them to try to break your bot when designing its behavior. Go ahead, give it a try.

Btw, WilBot is open-source; you can find the code on GitHub. You can use it as a starting point for The Next Great Facebook Bot (kidding?). It’s flexible enough so it’s easy to add new functionalities and/or integrate it with other APIs.

There are excellent resources out there if you want to get started building your own bots. Botwiki.org is a good starting point with useful tutorials, tools and articles. Also, Botmakers.org is a very active Slack community for bot developers and enthusiasts. If you are building a Facebook bot, I suggest you use this cheatsheet from Chatbot Academy when starting your design. Most important of all, keep in mind it’s on us to create a healthy bot community.

It’s exciting to think about the messaging landscape and how we are evolving the way we communicate with our family, friends, community and businesses. This is the beginning of something great.

PS: If you want to give feedback on WilBot, talk about improving its user experience or discuss how to add other functionalities, send me a message!

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