The document discusses creating a chatbot using Hubot, Wit.ai, and Node.js, focusing on handling frequently asked questions and automating holiday requests. It highlights the tools involved, their features, and the integration with Slack and Google Calendar. The author emphasizes the importance of conversation design and maintaining conversation state in chatbots, along with future steps to implement these features.

1. Going to holidays
with Wit.ai, Hubot, and Node.js

2. Whoami
Giovanni Lela
Tech lead @LinkMe
@lambrojos
http://github.com/lambrojos

3. Trying out NLP chatbots on a real issue
● (Very) frequently asked questions
○ how do I ask for permits / holidays / refunds / whatever
?
● Let the bot answer
● Bonus side quest: Can the bot ask for holidays
for me?

4. Tools
● Hubot
● Wit.ai
● Google apis

5. Hubot
Hubot is a chatbot framework by github.
● Clean architecture with lots of
community provider scripts
● Adapters
● Generators
● Persistance
● For some reason, coffeescript :(

6. Wit.ai
● Natural language processing
● Free for both public and private apps :/
● Easy
● Good support for Italian and speech recognition

7. Google apis
Well documented, extra powerful set of APIs
Has an useful API explorer
Quite boring to set up with oauth - so we cheated
and used service tokens.

8. Our objectives
● integrate with slack: easy
● respond to FAQ: ok
● creating events on google calendar: semi easy

9. Code time

10. Take at home points
● Training is boring
● A real chatbot needs to maintain conversation state - this
means we have to carefully design conversations
● NLP is not an answer to all chatbot problems

11. Next steps
Implement sessions in order to implement conversations
https://github.com/lmarkus/hubot-conversation
Design conversations
Less NLP

12. Project repo
https://github.com/linkmesrl/linkmebot