Catching Bugs in BugBot 🐜🤖 [A Message.io Homegrown Bot]

Around here, we’re constantly thinking about bots. What bots would be useful and to what teams or industries, how they should be built, how they should function.

So when our VP Dev Relations, Chris, specced out the idea for BugBot, our intern Arka Majumdar (a local high school student from Austin!) was excited to take it on. Arka not only built BugBot, but he threw in some AI. The result? A friendly, likable helpdesk bot that helps you out when you need to file a bug.

To get started, simply add BugBot on Cisco Spark — that’s it! Once you start a conversation with BugBot, you can track all of your bug reports.

BugBot responds well to natural language, thanks to api.ai. You can just let it know that you’ve got a problem, you’d like to view information about various bugs, or you can subscribe/unsubscribe from any currently reported bugs.

Once your bug’s created, BugBot helpfully throws a link out for you to check out the report. The helpdesk platform is a simple custom web view of the ticket, built into the bot’s code. The link takes you to the web view, but BugBot can be configured to display a link to the company’s helpdesk platform of choice.

Arka even presented it at the Austin Talkabot meetup on 6/19! (Want to come hang out with the Austin bot community and hear awesome presentations like this one? Join the meetup group!)

Photo credit: Liz Winkler

He built BugBot with the Botkit framework, and it’s hosted on Glitch. Interested in checking out BugBot? See it here.

Thanks again, Arka, for all of your work and jumping into the bot community feet-first!

Interested in reaching more users with your enterprise platform bot? We’re currently in private beta; check us out + get on the waitlist! 🤖