How to write a bot

Shortly after Facebook presented its Messenger API for conversational bots at the F8 conference in April 2016, the tech media were flooded with articles such as Why bots are the new big thing, There will be a bot for everything or Bots are the new generation of apps. While the statements contained in the articles might sound a bit exaggerated, it seems clear that bots will be ubiquitous soon. Just one month after Facebook’s event, they say that tens of thousands of developers are building chatbots. In this short ebook you’ll learn what a bot is and how it can be implemented and deployed. The essential aspect of bots is communication in natural language so we focus mainly on how free- form English text inputted to the bot can be analyzed and interpreted in order for the bot to “understand” what the user wants to convey. We also show with examples how developers can integrate their bots with databases and web services. The examples in this ebook are designed to work with the BotMaker app which is available for free on the App Store.