almakinah / bot-hackathon

A Facebook messenger bot example

AlMakinah bot hackathon

Installation

Part 1: Cloning and Deploying your Bot

• Clone this repo git clone https://github.com/AlMakinah/bot-hackathon.git
• Make sure you have nodejs and npm installed
• cd into your directory and npm install
• If you don't have account already, signup on heroku
• Download the heroku toolbelt
• Create an app on heroku
• Go to the deploy tab under your heroku app and get your deploy link git remote add heroku <YOUR-DEPLOY-LINK-HERE>
• Push your code to heroku git push heroku master
• Go to your app URL in the browser, you should see Hello world, I am a chat bot'

Part 2: Connecting your Bot with Facebook

• Create a Facebook page if you don't have one already
• Sign up https://developers.facebook.com/products/messenger
• Creating Facebook App for Messenger
• Go to My Apps
• Click on "Add a New App"
• Add a "Display Name", "Contact Email" and choose a category for your app
• Add a "Messenger" App
• Under "Token Generator" select your page and generate a token.
• Add the newly generated token in your code and push updates to heroku
• Setup a webhook, add your heroku app URL under "Callback URL" and your generated token under "Verify Token"
• if webhook is successful then you have connected your bot to Facebook!

Part 3: Test it

• Go to your Bot's corresponding Facebook page and send your Bot a Message
• Sending anything will have it echo it back to you
• Sending "hi" will show you a catalog of interactive links with predefined answers

Resources

• Facebook bots doc https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform
• Give your bot natural language https://wit.ai/
• https://howdy.ai/botkit/
• https://api.ai/
• https://textit.in/
• https://www.motion.ai/
• https://chatfuel.com/