Building a Bot With My Own Bot-Building Tool 🤖
I’ve been into bots since the early 15’s. I started by building a chatting bot to control and monitor my smart home and some demos to showcase what bots where able to do. With those projects, my chatbots got the attention of locals and the internet, and that helped me get closer to businesses and make bots for them.
As I started making bots for business, there were lots of bots to build for happy clients, and lots of codes that were exactly the same and needed exactly the same testing and maintenance. It was not being effective, and I knew it could be automated. That’s how Talkbot came to life.
Talkbot, a visual-pogramming platform for building bots, launched it’s beta 2 months ago. Since the day of beta launch, lots of knowledge and feedback has been captured. I’m amazed by all the different types of bots that people have been building and how they are doing it. It’s fascinating.
Time to Build a Bot With My Own Platform
I gave myself a challenge — build a completely functional bot in less than 24 hours using Talkbot’s platform. The idea: to build a chatbot that helps people find businesses and places near them, complete with ratings and hours of business.
That’s how Pancho 🐵 came to life. Pancho was built under 24 hours using Talkbot’s platform and a PHP script, even the images where designed within this 24-hours spectrum.
How Does Talkbot’s Platform Work?
The builder itself is in HTML5/JavaScript. You can create smart-conversation flows by wiring smart-boxes together so they build up a coherent flow of conversation, everything within one view, the canvas.
What are smart-boxes? Smart-boxes are meant to execute an action depending of it’s function. Some boxes send out messages, others process the user’s message to trigger an specific action.
Here is a small example of a bot showing off a car, asking the user if he/she likes it and then logging it in my server.
Building Pancho
With Pancho, the bot has to be a lot more complex. It has to be able to retrieve the user’s location and the query to search. The canvas for this bot seems a little bit scary, but it isn’t. Just a lot of boxes and connections. I still need to figure out how to make this easier to understand and build.
This is how the flow goes:
- The user greets, Pancho says “Hi” and introduces it’s services.
- The user triggers the services: “I’m looking for a drugstore”
- The bot calls a Google script that invokes the Search API to try to find what the user is looking for.
- Pancho returns the places that it found with opening-hours, rating, calling-options and directions to the place.
How did I build it? Here’s a screenshot of the complete flow of Pancho. The flow starts near the center of the canvas where the two blue wires are marked. Every time a user says “Hi” to Pancho the conversation will start it’s path, unless the bot is waiting for the user’s input in the middle of the conversation.
Feel free to message Pancho, just go to it’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Pancho-English-1237489086301006, click on “Send message” and say “Hi” to Pancho.
Here’s a video of the resulting bot:
So, what do you think Pancho and Talkbot’s platform? I challenge you to build a bot with Talkbot, if you do so let me know how did it go! Feedback is appreciated ❤️
We are hiring
Talkbot is looking for talent, there’s a lot of work to do. We want to deploy functional AI-bots for everyone with a single click. Shoot us an e-mail if you think you have the skills: join@talkbot.io.
Read more about my work at https://cabada.mx
