Cliq Bots - How to make a bot respond to your messages?

Bots are just like your buddies with whom you can interact. They carry out your tasks, keep you notified about your to-dos and come in handy when you need constant updates from a third party application.

So, how can you make your bot respond to a message?

The bot message handler is a piece of code triggered when a message is sent to the bot. Message handlers help you customise your bot responses to make it look conversational. The message input from the user can be either a string or an option selected from the bot suggestions.

Let us try building a utility bot, that will bring us the top news from a particular category chosen from the list of suggestions.

The sample workflow on triggering this handler is given below.

The user pings the bot to get a list of current top trending news.
Message handler of the bot identifies a keyword from the user's input and is triggered to respond with a list of categories for the user to choose from.
Once the user selects an option, the message input is again captured to call the corresponding API.
This API response is shared by the bot to the user in a card format!

A sample code snippet for the above-mentioned scenario is given below. Take a look!

response = Map();
categories = {"Business","Entertainment","Gaming","General","Health-and-Medical","Music","Politics","Science-and-Nature","Sport","Technology"};
if(message.containsIgnoreCase("NEWS") || message.containsIgnoreCase(" BREAKING NEWS") || message.containsIgnoreCase("HEADLINES"))
{
list = List();
for each category in categories
{
entry = Map();
entry.put("text",category);
list.add(entry);
}
suggestion = Map();
suggestion.put("list", list);
response.put("text","Hey " + user.get("first_name") + " ,choose one option from the list! I can help you with these. :smile:");
response.put("suggestions",suggestion);
}
else if(categories.containsIgnoreCase(message))
{
url = getUrl("https://newsapi.org/v2/top-headlines?category=" + message.toLowerCase() + "&language=en&apiKey=<Insert_API_Key>");
newslist = url.get("articles");
rows = List();
count = 0;
for each news in newslist
{
count = count + 1;
row = Map();
row.put("Headline",news.get("title"));
row.put("View Link","[Read More](" + news.get("url") + ")");
if(count <= 10)
{
rows.add(row);
}
}
return {"text":"Hello! Here's the top news in the " + message + " category!","card":{"theme":"modern-inline","title":"Hi " + user.get("first_name") + " :smile:"},"slides":{{"type":"table","data":{"headers":{"Headline","View Link"},"rows":rows}}}};
}
else
{
return {"text": "Hello There, this looks like an invalid category! Just try typing *News* or *Breaking News* or *Headlines*"};
}
return response;

The bot message handler is the easiest way to get started with building an interactive bot. So get started with it right away!

Few useful links:

Bots Introduction

How to create a bot?

Bot Message Handler

Comments and suggestions are welcome!

Best,

Manasa

Cliq

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