My name is Kameron Kales. I am a founder (along with Chris Comrie) of Glance. Glance is a chatbot company which helps students discover and view a day in the life working at startups. We work out of HQ Raleigh and live at Thinkhouse. In addition we were selected to be apart of the 2016 Innovators Program backed by Citrix and RedHat.
I can be reached at kameron@askglance.com. My cell phone number is 704-877-6219 or on facebook at facebook.com/kameron.kales
Things you will need for this talk:
1. NodeJS (install at https://nodejs.org/en/)
2. NPM (Should come with NodeJS)
3. Some sort of text editor (Im partial to Sublime but to each their own.)
4. Localtunnel (install at https://localtunnel.github.io/www/)
Today we are going to build an extremely simple chatbot on facebook messenger. We are going to use a pretty good open source framework to handle a lot of the heavy lifting. Shout out to howdy.ai (https://github.com/howdyai/botkit) for the resource.
If you are confused about any steps please shoot me a message!
Tools we are using & what they do:
1. NodeJS- to run our code. NodeJS is javascript on the backend.
2. NPM- Node package manager. Think of this kind of like the app store on an iphone.
It makes it really easy to pull in cool stuff to use in NodeJS.
3. Text Editor- This will be used to edit the code I provide
4. LocalTunnel- this is used to get secure callbacks approved on Facebook.
If that doesn't make any sense just know it makes it possible for your code on your computer
to connect to facebook. If that doesn't make sense scream out loud bots suck and I will come help you!
5. Facebook Developer Account - You need this to link your bot from running on your computer
to hooking up to your facebook page you created. (developer.facebook.com)
6. Facebook page- You hook your chatbot up to this.
So when you visit "DukeBot" you can get it to respond to you automatically.