Announcing the RingCentral Chatbot Framework for JavaScript

We are glad to announce the general availability of the RingCentral chatbot framework for JavaScript.

Using this framework, our philosophy is to let developers focus on business logic instead of implication details of connecting to the RingCentral and Glip Platform. We want to enable developers to create Glip chatbots with ease, even they know little about RingCentral platform and Glip API.

Supported features

We added the following key features to do the heavy lifting for you.

• Bot token management. The bot is always authorized to access Glip resources, developers don’t need to write any code to connection.
• Bot WebHook management. WebHooks are implemented in the framework so no code is needed to receive all kinds of events from Glip.
• Remove & re-add bot. You can remove and re-add chatbots as you want, and the framework will take care of the setting up and cleaning up.
• Deploy to AWS Lambda. By using this framework, the chatbot you created can be easily deployed to AWS Lambda.
• Update bot name and avatar. You can easily update bot name and avatar and as the developer you don’t need to write any code for it.
• Data Persistence. Data is saved in database. MySQL, Postgres and SQLite are supported.

Quickstart tutorials

We have tutorials to create and deploy a Glip chatbot on both your own server and AWS Lambda:

• Local Server: read this tutorial or watch this video
• AWS Lambda: read this tutorial or watch this video

Advanced demo chatbots

The follow demo chatbots provide example implementations to show the framework used in a fully operational bot.

• Glip Crontab Chatbot: allows Glip users to create cron jobs to send notifications. Try it. By reading its source code, you will get how to handle messages from users and how to reply.
• Glip RC Assistant Chatbot: allows Glip users to query/edit their RingCentral data via Glip. Try it. It is a demo for integrating Glip chatbot with RingCentral platform.
• Glip Google Drive Chatbot: allows Glip users to monitor their Google Drive events. Try it. It is a demo for integrating Glip chatbot with a third party service (Google Drive). It is also a demo for chatbot skills.

Hidden commands

It can be a common requirement to change the bot’s name and avatar. The framework provides the hidden commands above to let you do it. The following commands are considered “hidden” or “easter eggs”:

• Rename the bot: __rename__ <newName>: rename bot to newName
• Update the bot avatar: a message with text __setAvatar__ and an attached image file will set bot avatar to the attached image

Skills

In order to encourage chatbot code reuse, we introduce the mechanism of skills. You can create a skill and use it in multiple chatbots. You can also create a chatbot and use multiple skills in it.

For more information about skills, please refer to the documentation.

Integrate with third party services

A bot is boring if it cannot talk to third party services. Almost all third party services use OAuth for authorization. So we summarized the best practice for integrating a third party service.

For more information about integration with third party services, please refer to the documentation.

Summary

That’s all about the chatbot framework. If you want to create a chatbot for RingCentral Glip, do give this framework a try. It contains lots of best practices and it will make you life much easier!