Building a chatbot on Facebook Messenger with Ruby on Rails

Even if I'm an happy Ruby developer,

I feel that realizing a chatbot - in a specific programming language, - with a standard framework (Rails), - for a specific channel (Messenger), is an ERROR, in the log terms.

BTW, I realized naif, my personal micro framework just to build chatbots in Ruby (see slides: https://github.com/solyaris/naif),

Nevertheless, I decided to NOT publish the code and no more deepen that "hard-coded" way, instead I suggest to use and support a chatbot scripting (meta)language. About rationales, I wrote a bunch of articles: www.medium.com/@solyarisoftware

I support opensource great ChatScript (https://github.com/bwilcox-1234/ChatScript/) and BTW I wrote simple client in Ruby (https://github.com/solyaris/rChatScript/)

My two cents giorgio @solyarisoftware

I've got mixed feelings about api.ai, I haven't tried others like wit.ai because more hype was around api.ai.

Firstly, their libraries feel incomplete. 2 months ago I tried their nodejs one, and after some frustration, I ended up wrapping their REST calls. Last week I was working with someone new on our team, and we tried the Python one [0], again a mess, and we ended up wrapping the API around Python requests.

There is little activity on GH given that there might be other people having similar issues.

Webhooks are a take-it-all-or-leave it IMHO. When invoking a webhook call from an action, you can only respond once (i.e. no follow-up through api.ai). My conclusion from this part was that you can't build a serious (are they ever) bot relying solely on api.ai, and you have to do some heavy lifting on your server side.

What I have appreciated so far is their NLP part, it's hard (or impossible for some of us without the knowledge) to roll our own NLP solution, so I can give them props over making that part easy.

I'll keep using it as I'm training our team using api.ai, but if there are "better" solutions that other people have tried, I'd be keen on hearing their experiences.

[0] https://github.com/api-ai/apiai-python-client

The hype cycle includes a plateau of productivity where the technology is actually useful. My guess is that there will be a place for chatbots, but they're not going to be the be all end all of UI :)