Catbot— Our First Open Source!

We thought the Product Hunt cat was the perfect picture for this :-)

Today we’re going to open source one of our internal tools “Catbot” (named after the person who inspired its creation). We use Catbot to build highly customizable bots, we felt like we had to build it because we couldn’t find a tool for customer interaction we liked enough.

Catbot in action as Support

Here it is!

Catbot has a very Facebook Messenger like feel to it. Including things like Chat Suggestions and those annoying dots while the other party is typing. We’re looking to customize every facet of the experience for a logged-in user, which is why we didn’t just hook into Facebook’s Messenger for Business.

It’s built with CSS, JavaScript & jQuery. The example on the left is partially plugged into api.ai — which forces cURL requests, so, unfortunately, there is some PHP involved. We used an Ajax request to make a request to our backend though, so feel free to replace that & plug-and-play whatever backend you’d like.

You can scrap parts like Suggestions if your app doesn’t make use of them, it’s as simple as deleting or commenting out the Suggestions section in the HTML. It’s pretty easy to throw more tools in. In the Wing Support project, we went further and hooked it up to Firebase and built a two-sided chat application so a human could intervene if our chatbot didn’t cut it.

Catbot scales down to mobile quite well — it supports windowless “app” mode & status bar recoloring on both iOS and Android. It also scales up to work on wide-screen Desktop displays relatively well, in a fashion similar to messenger.com.

Play with it here.

UPDATE: We later migrated to Intercom :-)