Guillermo's Open Project Ideas

[lealgamb]

Here are some of the ideas that interest me:

• Add the ability to @mention a user.

• Implement a notification system.

• Create a search index from the message database.

• Write a bot that generates new conversations and messages, and make it one of your users.

Let me know what you guys think. Also, ideally I'd be working on adding features to the activity feed and cleaning up the code along the way.

[vocatwk]

All sounds great. Third one would be particularly helpful in all the other features we could implement!

[lealgamb]

I'll make sure that's the first feature I work on. I took the last one from the suggested ideas. I also don't fully understand it but I thought it would be interesting to work on, or at least attempt.

[vocatwk]

yeah I just looked up what bots actually do and then edited the message lol

[yelsayd]

The bot idea is very interesting. It's one of those features that can be as complicated and involved as we want it to be.
Do you guys have any thoughts on what it would look like?

[lealgamb]

Honestly I'm not too sure. Are you asking what it would do or something else?

[yelsayd]

Yea what do you think it should do? Is is like a personal assistant? What kind of questions can you ask it?

[lealgamb]

Hmm. Perhaps making it a personal assistant would be useful. Instead of having a FAQ the bot can take its place. I'm thinking that if we implement styled text then users can ask it for the necessary symbols.

[yelsayd]

That's a great idea! How about starting a small design doc to talk about this in a little more detail?

[lealgamb]

I created a Team Drive and shared the doc on there.

[yelsayd]

Here's an idea to kick off a simple bot feature: If users send a message to any conversation, where the message has some special format (e.g. starts with "/bot", "/assistant", "/help".. etc), then the message is sent to a new Bot class, which handles the message content. For now, we can have it respond by saying "hi, this is your assistant" or something, to every message.

The goal is to try to remove much of the complexity that comes with the idea of implementing a chatbot to make it less daunting, so we can get started quickly, while at the same time leaving a lot of gaps for improvement.

Thoughts?

[vocatwk]

I like it. we could make it so that it so that it goes to the Bot class when they @ mention the Bot.