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!

2. response = Map();
3. categories = {"Business","Entertainment","Gaming","General","Health-and-Medical","Music","Politics","Science-and-Nature","Sport","Technology"};
4. if(message.containsIgnoreCase("NEWS") || message.containsIgnoreCase(" BREAKING NEWS") || message.containsIgnoreCase("HEADLINES"))
5. {
6. list = List();
7. for each  category in categories
8. {
9. entry = Map();
10. entry.put("text",category);
11. list.add(entry);
12. }
13. suggestion = Map();
14. suggestion.put("list", list);
16. response.put("text","Hey " + user.get("first_name") + " ,choose one option from the list! I can help you with these. :smile:");
17. response.put("suggestions",suggestion);
18. }
19. else if(categories.containsIgnoreCase(message))
20. {
21. url = getUrl("https://newsapi.org/v2/top-headlines?category=" + message.toLowerCase() + "&language=en&apiKey=<Insert_API_Key>");
22. newslist = url.get("articles");
23. rows = List();
24. count = 0;
25. for each  news in newslist
26. {
27. count = count + 1;
28. row = Map();
29. row.put("Headline",news.get("title"));
30. row.put("View Link","[Read More](" + news.get("url") + ")");
31. if(count <= 10)
32. {
33. rows.add(row);
34. }
35. }
36. 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}}}};
37. }
38. else 
39. {
40. return {"text": "Hello There, this looks like an invalid category! Just try typing *News* or *Breaking News* or *Headlines*"};
41. }
42. 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

• Topic Participants

• Manasa Manogaran

  

• Kevin Flynn

  

• thiago.silva

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