lazyweb: trying to find a blog post with tips for how to design bots that interact over SMS
-
lazyweb: trying to find a blog post with tips for how to design bots that interact over SMS
less "how to use the Twilio API" (that's easy), more "what state to store in the database, tips for designing state machines, how to keep it simple, etc”
-
@b0rk I think you mostly just need the from address (a phone number) in order to keep the conversations correlated. Since there are not multiple threads with sms it is a bit easier to manage than, say, teams.
Botkit basically walked a map of messages and options defined in json as the user interacts. We stored the from, position in map, and any question answers, along with a full transcript. There were js hooks that allowed the bot to run code at certain points in the map.
-
@b0rk the Botkit core library IMHO still a good model for fully scripted bots
-
@benbrown thank you!
-
@b0rk happy to help more if needed, i still spend a lot of time thinking about this type of thing!
-
@benbrown the "getting started" docs are already really helpful, I'm using Go so I can't use botkit directly but maybe I can try to implement a basic version of the API it describes. It looks like it would be nice to use. https://github.com/howdyai/botkit/blob/main/packages/docs/index.md#hearing-messages
-
@b0rk thank you, we worked hard on those!!
Yes I think the pattern is good and it is just arrays and callbacks really…
