open event

When we start a chat with SUSI.AI on Viber i.e. SUSI Viberbot, there should be an option on how to get started with the bot. The response to it are some options like “Visit repository”, “How to contribute” which direct the user to check how SUSI.AI bot is made and prompts him/her to contribute to it. Along with that an option of “start chatting” can be shown to add up some sample queries for the user to try.

To accomplish the task at hand, we will accomplish these sub tasks:

1. To show the “Get started” button.
2. To show the reply to “Get started” query.
3. To respond to the queries, nested in the response of “Get started”

Showing “Get started”:

The Viber developers platform notifies us when a user starts a conversation with our bot. To be exact, a conversation_started event is sent to our webhook and can be handled accordingly. The Viberbot shows a welcome message to the user along with a Get started button to help him/her start.

To send just the welcome message:

if (req.body.event === 'conversation_started') {
       // Welcome Message
       var options = {
           method: 'POST',
           url: 'https://chatapi.viber.com/pa/send_message',
           headers: headerBody,
           body: {
               // some required body properties here
               text: 'Welcome to SUSI.AI!, ' + req.body.user.name + '.',
               // code for showing the get started button here.
        }
           json: true
       };
 
       request(options, function(error, res, body) {
           // handle error
       });
   }

The next step is to show the “Get started” button. To show that we use a keyboard tool, provided by Viber developers platform. So after the “text” key we have the “keyboard” key and a value for it:

keyboard: {
             "Type": "keyboard",
             "DefaultHeight": true,
             "Buttons": [{
                 "ActionType": "reply",
                 "ActionBody": "Get started",
             }]
         }

The action type as shown in the code, can be “reply” or “open-url”. The “reply” action type, triggers an automatic query sent back with “Get started” (i.e. the value of “ActionBody” key), when that button gets clicked.

Hence, this code helps us tackle our first sub task:

Reply to “Get started”:

We target to make each SUSI.AI bot generic. The SUSI FBbot and SUSI Tweetbot shows some options like “Visit repository”, “Start chatting” and “How to contribute?” for the “Get started” query. We render the same answer structure in Viberbot.

The “rich_media” type helps us send buttons in our reply message. As we ought to use three buttons in our message, the button rows are three in the body object:

if(message === "Get started"){
                   var options = {
                       method: 'POST',
                       url: 'https://chatapi.viber.com/pa/send_message',
                       headers: headerBody,
                       body: {
                           // some body object properties here
                           type: 'rich_media',
                           rich_media: {
                               Type: "rich_media",
                               ButtonsGroupColumns: 6,
                               ButtonsGroupRows: 3,
                               BgColor: "#FFFFFF",
                               Buttons: buttons
                           }
                       },
                       json: true
                   };
 
                   request(options, function(error, res, body) {
                       if (error) throw new Error(error);
                       console.log(body);
                   });

As said before, 2 type of Action types are available – “open-url” and “reply”. “Visit repository” button has an “open-url” action type and “How to contribute?” or “start chatting” has a “reply” action type.

Example of “Visit repository” button:

var buttons = [{
                Columns: 6,
                Rows: 1,
                Text: "Visit repository",
                "ActionType": "open-url",
                "ActionBody": "https://www.github.com/fossasia/susi_server",
                // some text styling properties here
             }];

To respond to the “reply” action type queries:

When the “reply” action type button gets clicked, it triggers an automatic query sent back to the bot with the value same as that of the “ActionBody” key. So we just need to apply a check if the message string recieved is “Start chatting” or “How to contribute?”

For the response to “Start chatting”, we plan to show sample queries for the user to try. This can be shown by using buttons with the action type as “reply”.

Code snippet to show a button with the text as “What is FOSSASIA?”:

var buttons = [{
                        Columns: 6,
                        Rows: 1,
                        Text: "What is FOSSASIA? ",
                        "ActionType": "reply",
                        "ActionBody": "What is FOSSASIA?",
                        // text styling here
                    }];

For the response to “How to contribute”, we show some messages to help the user contribute to SUSI.AI. These messages also just need buttons with it, to be able to apply the necessary action.

We respond with 2 messages to the user, both the messages have a button.

For example, a button to visit the SUSI.AI Gitter channel:

var buttons = [{
                    Columns: 6,
                    Rows: 1,
                       Text: "<font color=#323232><b>Chat on Gitter</b></font>",
                      ActionType: "open-url",
                      ActionBody: "https://www.gitter.im/fossasia/susi_server",
                      // text styling here
            }];

This way we have successfully added the “Get started” option to our Viberbot and handled all the subsequent steps.

Resources:

1. Viber video managing chat extensions by Ingrid Lunden from Tech crunch.
2. Develop a chat bot with node js by Slobodan Stojanović from smashing magazine.