nonva / abot

Abot makes it easy and fun to build your own digital assistant, and we include everything you need to get started.

Abot

Website | Getting Started | Contributing | Mailing List

Abot (pronounced Eh-Bot, like the Canadians) is a digital assistant framework that enables anyone to easily build a digital assistant similar to Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Google Now, or Amazon Alexa. Further, Abot supports a human-aided training backend enabling anyone to build services like Facebook M.

Unlike those proprietary systems, Abot is open-sourced and extensible. By providing an extensible platform onto which anyone can easily add functionality, Abot is the first A.I. framework that aims to be available everywhere and— ultimately—to do everything.

Note: This is being developed heavily. There may be breaking API changes in each release until we hit v1.0. Follow our progress on the Roadmap.

Installation

Dependencies: Abot requires that the following programs are installed:

• Go >= 1.6
• PostgreSQL >= 9.5

Fetch Abot via go get

$ go get github.com/itsabot/abot
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/itsabot/abot

Run the setup script, passing in your Postgres credentials/host if needed.

$ cmd/setup.sh [username[:password]@host[:port]]

If you don't pass anything to the script, the Postgres parameters will default to host = 127.0.0.1, port = 5432, and username = postgres. You may need to edit your pg_hba.conf file if you want to use this password-less default.

During setup, if the psql binary is unavailable, the script will skip the database setup. To setup the database on an different machine, you can run cmd/dbsetup.sh on the host that has Postgres / psql available. This script takes the same arguments as cmd/setup.sh.

Once the script completes, launch the server

$ abot server

Then visit Abot at localhost:4200.

Usage

First configure the plugins you want to import, such as weather. Add them to your plugin.json like so:

{
	"Name": "abot",
	"Version": "0.1.0",
	"Dependencies": {
		"github.com/itsabot/plugin_onboard": "*",
		"github.com/itsabot/plugin_weather": "*"
	}
}

Then run the following in your terminal to download the plugins:

$ abot plugin install
Fetching 2 plugins...
Installing plugins...
Success!

That will download the plugins into your $GOPATH and install them into Abot. Once you've installed the plugins, run Abot again: abot server. You can use the included Abot console to communicate with Abot locally:

$ abot console [phone]
> Hi
Hello there!

You can learn more in our Getting Started guide.

Goals

We believe that A.I. will impact every business worldwide and dramatically change our lives. While Apple, Google and others rush to build proprietary digital assistants, there's a great need for an open approach that can be made to run anywhere and be customized to do anything you need.

Abot enables any person or business to build digital assistants like Siri using plugins that are as easy to install and run as WordPress. Soon it'll be as easy to leverage A.I. in your business as it is to start a blog or an online store. Imagine setting up an AI assistant to answer your phones, schedule meetings, and book travel for your company in 30 seconds or less. The future's almost here, and Abot's going to lead the way.

We have a long road ahead of us, but "nothing ever comes to one that is worth having except as a result of hard work." -- Booker T. Washington

Follow our progress on our Roadmap or learn how you can get involved with our Contributor's Guide.

License

MIT, a copy of which you can find in the repo.

The Abot logo is courtesy of Edward Boatman via TheNounProject and licensed via Creative Commons Attribution v3.

The default plugin icon (puzzle piece) is courtesy of Arthur Shlain via TheNounProject and licensed via Creative Commons Attribution v3.