Integrating DialogFlow and Fb Messenger for Facebook Hackathon

Last Friday as I came stepped foot into the Facebook building, I was greeted by staff that directed me to sign up for the event. After being handed a badge, I was escorted up the elevator to the floor where there was a huge room with tables set up. I immediately met new people who were other Flatiron grads, some from Fullstack, and others who even went to the same High School but in a different graduating year.

Walking around the space, I found several cool ideas utilizing Facebook Messenger’s bot or the Spark AR. I then was approached by two people who were from the same company (Akhil is an iOS dev, Cory is a React/React Native dev). Ronny the third, is a Data Analyst. I found that it was cool to form a group with diverse backgrounds because each individual can help out a specific area of the project. I found an article https://medium.com/crowdbotics/how-to-create-your-very-own-facebook-messenger-bot-with-dialogflow-and-node-js-in-just-one-day-f5f2f5792be5 and sent it on the Slack group.

The reason that we used DialogFlow is because it makes it easy and utilizes NLP which helps out when we want the bot to respond to specific things. It is pretty fun to use. I began to dive into creating an agent which automatically adds two intents. The webhook will notify the bot when a bunch of events happen. They are POST requests to the webhook. Whenever the webhook event is received, a 200 OK HTTP response must be returned. Failing to return a 200 OK will cause the webhook to be unsubscribed by the Messenger Platform. DialogFlow will route the convo to Messenger through a webhook. For one of the intents Setting timer for Water and workouts, I added several commands such as “Set a timer for 3 pm tomorrow” and “Timer for 2 pm today”. The bolded words are keywords that the google assistant can pick up to give a response we want such as “Got it. your workout time will be 2 pm today.”

It was a successful hackathon even though my team wasn’t one of the winners. We learned a lot as we didn’t realize Facebook’s messenger bot can be used for a lot of businesses, personal branding, subscription services, the purposes of using it are limitless. Spark AR sparked my interest as I didn’t know that the program can make augmented reality experience with/without code. I’ve been seeing my friends and followers post filters and they are created using Spark AR. It will be cool for me to write a future blog on my experience using Spark AR.

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