Botty, a basic conversational bot using socket.io and nodeJS.

   

Table of Contents 📝

• Talking to Botty 💬
• Configuring Botty 🔧
  • General
  • Interaction
• Extending Botty's Responses ✍️
• Running Botty Locally 🚀
• Botty in the ☁️

 

Talking to Botty 💬

Botty is built on top of socket.io by default, meaning you should use a client implementation of this to talk to it.

In JavaScript we can simply do something like:

import io from 'socket.io-client';

const socket = io(
  'https://botty.alexgurr.com',
  { transports: ['websocket', 'polling', 'flashsocket'] }
);

socket.on('bot-message', (message) => {
  // do something
});

Botty is simple and cleanly written. This makes it easy to swap out socket.io for a general web socket or REST solution for example.

 

Configuring Botty 🔧

Botty has an easy-to-change constants file, called constants.js in the root of the server. Here's what you can change:

General

General configuration

• PORT: where the Botty server should listen.

• RESPONSES_FILE_PATH: the file location of the dataset file Botty should source it's responses from. Expects a csv file with keys matching RESPONSES_INPUT_KEY and RESPONSES_OUTPUT_KEY below.

• RESPONSES_INPUT_KEY: the name of the input (matched phrase) column in the csv file above

• RESPONSES_OUTPUT_KEY: the name of the output (message) column in the csv file above

• USER_MESSAGE_EVENT: the event string Botty listens to for user socket messages.

• BOT_MESSAGE_EVENT: the event string Botty will emit for it's reponse messages.

• BOT_TYPING_EVENT: the event string Botty will emit when typing a response. If MAX_TYPING_S is falsy, this event will never be emitted.

Interaction

Things to make Botty seem more real

• DEFAULT_RESPONSE: the message Botty replies with if it finds no response matches.

• RESPONSE_MATCH_THRESHOLD: Botty response-matching tolerance. The lower this value, the looser the matches.

• MIN_TYPING_S: the minimum value Botty should 'type' for, in seconds.

• MAX_TYPING_S: the maximum value Botty should 'type' for, in seconds. Set this to 0 to skip typing events.

• MIN_NATURAL_PAUSE_S: the minimum pause Botty will take before emitting it's first event, in seconds.

• MAX_NATURAL_PAUSE_S: the maximum pause Botty will take before emitting it's first event, in seconds.

 

Extending Botty's Responses ✍️

Botty has a default dataset file called response_dataset.csv. This is easily extendable, or you can provide your own. If you want to bring your own file, simple change the value of the RESPONSES_FILE_PATH constant and make sure it's in the correct format (see constants above).

Feel free to open a pull request to extend the default file.

 

Running Botty Locally 🚀

yarn

# Botty will be available through socket.io on the port defined through the PORT constant
yarn start

 

Botty in the ☁️

Botty is currently hosted and waiting to chat to your app at https://botty.alexgurr.com/. The server isn't free - if you'd like to help out you could

Botty is currently actively used in the Chatter ReactJS Coding Challenge.