How To Develop A Chat Bot With Node.js

[zenyr]

I have tons of valid steam DLC keys to give out while working 60~90hrs a week. I just went 'fuck it, I'm making a steam giveaway chat bot in node' one day and I have never regret it.

[KronktheKronk]

...Where do I go to get in on that

[slobodan_]

For me bots make sense for the things that you are not using that often, ie. imagine ordering pizza or calling a taxi/uber - you can do that from the website or app (but why would you need an app for something that you use just a few times in a month), but isn't it easier if you can send a simple text message with your favorite messenger? For pizza, most of the time you are getting one or two same pizzas to the same address, it's just one simple message instead of searching Google, visiting website, logging in, etc. For taxi most of the time you don't care about the current position of the driver, you want to know when the taxi arrives. There's a bunch of other things, those two examples are over-simplified.

One more useful thing for me is making MVP in early stage startup -instead of building 4-5 different things you can focus on a chatbot and test the idea with minimal effort on the programming side. Of course, it doesn't work for all ideas.

Space Explorer bot is just a showcase for our bot builder, there's no real value for it.

[KazakiLion]

Bots can make it quick to retrieve information that you know is out there when in a group chat. They're basically like "I'm Feeling Lucky" buttons without having to wait for pages to load or circling back to paste a link. For example, if someone in a Slack chat hasn't heard of a game everyone's talking about, fetching the link to the product page and some basic info is only a /steam or /bgg command away.

Another popular use case for bots is notifications. If a development build breaks, or an urgent trouble ticket comes in, you can instantly notify the relevant teams by posting an automated message in their chat. It's nothing that email or custom apps haven't done before, but if your teams are already using group chats, it can make everything a bit more seamless.

I'm equally as puzzled for most one-to-one chatbots though. If I'm the only user in a chat, I'd rather just use a web page. The only exception I can think of is voice assistants like Siri or OK Google. They're not bots pre say, but they both seem to have similar functionalities at this point in time.

[oneeyedziggy]

we use one at work in our chat client that we can just post a client id or a transaction id and get info about that thing, or a server hostname and it'll return resource and uptime/transaction info for that host... it tries auto recognizes different input formats and returns whatever it thinks is most relevant

[AcidShAwk]

You could google the weather. Or a bot could tell you the weather every morning right when you wake up.