Open Source Bot Builder for Facebook and Slack

Botkit  Live Chat Software

A Bot Builder for Facebook, Slack and WebChat

Botkit is bot designing tool with lots of integrations including Microsoft Teams, Twilio, Facebook for Work and Cisco Spark. Build interactive bots with Botkit.

Botkit is a bot designing tool

Botkit

GitHub

Overview

Reaching out and engaging customers with good user experience is a big challenge of the current digital age and chat bots are a great way to meet this challenge. Botkit is an easy to learn and simple to use NodeJS based open source bot framework. The broad support for major messaging platforms makes it one of the best choice for the bot building.

Botkit has made it simple and easy for the businesses to response to their customers from all popular messaging applications even in their offline business hours.

Botkit provides a quick starter kit which makes the life of developers very easy to kick start with bot building. The framework is very flexible and customizable and gives you access to the underlying platform APIs and you have more control over the look and feel of your interaction with the customer.

Its part of Microsoft Bot Framework and works with Microsoft LUIS AI or any natural language processing engine you choose to integrate with your bot. Initially Botkit was a choice of developers for building productivity and work centric bots for Slack platform but since Microsoft has acquired the Botkit the framework has changed and now support multiple communication channels.

Since Botkit doesn’t have its own NLP but its not a disadvantage, rather an advantage because this makes it flexible and to support whichever NLP engine you want. You can use Botkit to build different types of bots from content sharing chatbots to productivity chatbots and gaming chatbots.

Requirements

Each Botkit bot is actually a Node.js app, made up of the Botkit core library, a basic web server, and the application logic and plugins that combine to make your bot special. To run Botkit, you will need to have Node installed on your computer.

Features

Following are the key features of Botkit

  • Receiving Messages
  • Sending Messages
  • Using Dialogs
  • Organize Your Bot Code
  • Using Bot Framework Channels
  • Building & Using Plugins
  • Middlewares

Currently, Botkit supports receiving messages from a variety of sources

  • Slack Real Time Messaging (RTM)
  • Slack Incoming Webhooks
  • Slack Slash Commands
  • Facebook Messenger Webhooks
  • Twilio IP Messaging

Installation Instructions

The best way to get started locally with Botkit is by installing our command line tool, and using it to create a new Botkit project. This will install and configure a starter kit for you!

npm install -g yo generator-botkit
yo botkit

Start from Scratch

You can also add Botkit into an existing Node application.

First, add it to your project:

npm install --save botkit

Then, add Botkit to your application code:

let { Botkit } = require('botkit');

const controller = new Botkit(MY_CONFIGURATION);

controller.hears('hello','direct_message', function(bot, message) {
    bot.reply(message,'Hello yourself!');
});
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