Bot Feature Requirements

[lealgamb]

When a user @ mentions the bot (i.e. @nemobot) in a message, the bot should respond.

Bot Features:

• Provide keywords a user can mention

• Provide answers to user questions, kind of like a Q&A feature.

• Provide statistics for conversations (i.e. number of users and messages in conversations)

• Deal with invalid user input (i.e. "Sorry, I didn't understand that. Try mentioning one of these words [...].")

These are the initial features I can think of. Let me know what you guys think.

EDIT
We can probably use contains(keyword) so the user's query doesn't have to exactly match, but this might not be the best way to go about it.

To start, I'm thinking the bot can provide relevant information for each page/feature on our site.
These keywords can include "conversations, messages, profiles, activity feed, notifications, and search bar". Also just the word "help" and the bot can give general tips.

[yelsayd]

Good start. Can we try to add more details?

• What kind of questions can the user ask? A specific initial list would be good here, so that the implementation has something to start with.
• I'm assuming we'll start with a hard-coded list of questions, where the user's query must exactly match one of the questions to be considered, can we discuss the list here?

The goal of making this specific is to guide the implementation process, by making the end goal as clear as possible, so that we can then decide on the step breakdown (prototype, MVP, or any other steps we want to add).

[vocatwk]

Are we going to be using natural language processing?
In addition to the FAQ, users could ask the bot to set a reminder of some sort and have the bot schedule coffee with one of their friends. Idk how helpful that is though.

[lealgamb]

I've never used natural language processing but I'm definitely willing to try to help and learn along the way. I like the reminder feature and it can pair up nicely with the notifications.

Also I edited the original post with some keywords.

[yelsayd]

We can look into using the DialogFlow API as a stretch goal here. let's see when we get there. :)

[yelsayd]

Do you think we'd want to have the ability to extend the Bots framework to add more bots a requirement?

[vocatwk]

Is it so that users can add bots that other users can use? and so users can add questions and answers to an already exixsting bot to enhance it?

[yelsayd]

Well, since this is an open source project, I imagine anyone interested might want to contribute to the code to add or modify a bot. If we want to support developer contributions to bots (or our own in the future), we should try to make the framework extensible so that when adding a new bot, the developer does not need to understand too many pieces in the codebase.

[lealgamb]

That's a good idea. I was thinking of storing the questions/keywords in a map. On creation, each Bot has the "essential" information in a map. Public functions like addBotEntry(Key k, Value v) can be implemented with perhaps a Bot Management page. Is this similar to what you guys have in mind?

[yelsayd]

Yes, I think this is reasonable. The workflow for adding a new bot is then to create the class (perhaps extend some base Bot class?) and implement some method such as parseMessage or answerMention, then maybe add it to a singleton map with the appropriate mention name?

[lealgamb]

Sorry I haven't worked with singleton maps before. Before I ask about it, I just want to make sure I understand what you described.

• UserCreatedBot extends Bot

• parseMessage or answerMention will perform the same functionality that the current Bot class has

• Add it to a singleton map. Will the key be the mention name and the value be UserCreatedBot?

Also, from what I understand we can't put items in a singleton map later on, so I'm having trouble figuring out why we want this.

[yelsayd]

Not sure what you mean by "can't put items in a singleton map."
Also, I haven't been accurate. What I meant was a singleton class where the instance contains a map. What I had in mind is something along the lines of:

class MyWeatherBotImplementation extends Bot {
  ...
}
BotController.getInstance().registerBot('@weatherBot', MyWeatherBotImplementation);

...
// somewhere when parsing messages..
Bot bot = BotController.getInstance().getBot(mentionKey); // where mentionKey == '@weatherBot'
String answer = bot.answerMessage('what's the weather like today?');

[lealgamb]

I was referring to this SO question, but I guess it's different from what we're talking about.

This cleared things up, thanks. So just to be sure, we'll have one "main" bot that's responsible for answering messages about our app. Then, users will have the ability to create their own bots. At this stage, will the users be responsible for creating the message->answer map, or is this something we should handle, perhaps with the DialogFlow API?

[yelsayd]

I think when we have such a framework in place (the singleton map controller), we should rework the current Bot class implementation to name it NemoBot for example or HelpBot, and have it extend from the new Bot base class (or just interface if there's no common functionality).
Thoughts?

[lealgamb]

Renaming it makes sense. And I think making it extend the base class will be better since all bots will have to parse a message and answer a mention.