Developing a Facebook Messenger Bot (Part 1)

Many people have been talking about bots and conversational UI for quite some time now. I can remember, that an employee at a former startup of mine once developed an IRC bot to gather daily time tracking data from the team, since noone wanted to use the UI of the time tracking tool — that was many years ago!

Today the hype about bots is just about to hit mainstream. With Facebook revealing their bot platform for Messenger during this week’s F8, there is no excuse anymore for not knowing about conversational UI. Mark Zuckerberg made it very clear, that a chat bot can — in many cases — deliver a much better customer experience than apps or websites. Sure, people will push it too far and use conversational UI even in places, where a traditional GUI would make more sense — but there are still a lot of sensible use cases for conversational UI and bots.

I plan to document my progress in creating a Facebook Messenger bot in a few articles. I hope that following my struggles can save you some time once you want to get started on the same adventure. So let’s begin…

Where to start?

After watching the F8 keynote, I was excited to see the first session on Messenger bots that day. Sadly, there was no code in that session and the information was just a marketing extension of the keynote (the…