I gave this presentation at the Yow CTO Summit in Sydney in December 2016. It was a fun presentation detailing some of my favourite bots we've built in Domain, different ways you can use bots, and some tools for getting started building bots. Focuses primarily on our chat tool - Slack.
11. Bots
Bots enrich your team conversations with timely, contextual information
They provide a shared and viral command line
They are super easy to build
Even a CTO can do it
39. Some frameworks...
howdy.ai/botkit (Node)
lita.io (Ruby)
MS Bot Framework (C# or Node)
hubot.github.com (CoffeeScript)
.. or simple REST endpoints and scripts
http://nordicapis.com/12-frameworks-to-build-chatops-bots/
47. Takeaways...
Bots add contextual information where your team is communicating
Shared and viral command line
Many, many use cases
Easy to get started via bot frameworks and existing APIs
Easy to write and start adding value
Even a Tech Director can do it
A couple of years ago we posted an article on our tech blog about chatops, which we thought was pretty amazing and revolutionary at the time….
A couple of years ago we posted an article about chatops on our tech blog (tech.domain.com.au). What we loved about chatops was that it’s about getting relevant, contextual, timely information into the same forum where our team was already communicating.
...and the way that is done is via bots.
so what are bots? I like this definition --- even if it does remind me of this little guy a bit
but recently the term bots have been hijacked. by our product and marketing teams as they start to build bots for consumers. This seemed to happen about the time that Facebook released their Messenger bot platform. Slack has also been getting a lot of attention..
Our marketing team loves bots! When some of our team built a consumer bot on the Facebook platform and our marketing team went nuts.
But here's a secret - consumer bots all kind of suck. And that’s because they aren’t very smart - AI is simply not ready to have a conversation with your average user.
Amazon know they aren’t smart - in fact they will give you $1 MILLION DOLLARS if you can write some AI they will chat to you for 20 minutes
So what are they good for? Structured, repetitive tasks. Which is probably why developers love bots, because they remind them of this...
To the developer, the chatbot interface feels like home.
For this presentation I’m going to focus on technical bots - glorified command lines.
Automating feedback - CRE alerts when stats reach a threshold
Automating feedback - the block script. Collaborative chat rooms with useful, timely information.
Our most popular bot was built as part of a hackathon.
Looking up information - email sender reputation.
API First + microservices
Viral - once someone sees a bot in use, they are likely to pick it up and continue using it.
API First + microservices
Keeps you in the flow - no need to go off to another site to get information. Pull the information to chat rooms you are already communicating in.
Can be used to automatically enrich a conversation - looking up relevant information without being asked to.
Can be used to take quick action - in this to reindex or delete a listing from our elasticsearch cluster.
Thank you so much for listening to our story so far.
We definitely have a lot to learn, and a lot to improve on. But it’s been really a lot of fun so far, and I really hope when I look back at this slide deck in a years or so time that I would be completely ashamed of what we’ve got here. Because then you know you’ve made real progress, and we can look back and laugh, and go remember the days when xy/xy.