bot-express is a chatbot development framework to build tailer-made chatbot lightning fast. Developers can extend the chatbot capability just by adding skills.

• NLU integration.
• Context aware behavior.
• Auto parameter collection based on skill.
• Auto language translation.
• Support multiple messengers.
• Available as npm package.

A chatbot based on bot-express is composed of following components.

• Messenger
• NLU
• Bot instance（Node.js app based on bot-express）

Developers can extend the chatbot capability just by adding skills. 1 skill is simply composed by 1 script file. Developers can make chatbot more painstaking by creating polished skill and make it more capable by adding wide variety of skills.

The very basic workflow of bot-express based chatbot is following.

1. A user sends message to a chatbot.
2. bot-express forwards the message to NLU and identifies the intent of the message.
3. bot-express pickup a skill corresponding to the identified intent.
4. The skill is executed. ex: Reply to the user, Update the database, Send signal to IoT devices.

bot-express continues interaction with the user until it accomplish the mission defined by the skill. The interaction is conducted to respond/collect required information. Developers can configure the parser and reaction for every single parameters to collect and they are automatically applied to each messages from the user.

bot-express can be installed by installing a npm package just like below.

$ npm install --save bot-express

Running through the tutorial is a fastest way to learn bot-express since it covers the most important configurations step by step.

Tutorial: Create pizza delivery reception bot using bot-express

Also take a glance at sample_skill directory which contains some sample skills.

Sample skills

As for the complete configurations, spec of the skill script and API, please refer to the following document.

https://nkjm.github.io/bot-express

• LINE
• Facebook Messenger

• Dialogflow

Set environment variable DEBUG to "bot-express:*" to activate full debugging. In production environment, setting "bot-express:skill-status" is recommended. To make this debugging work properly when you use redis as memory store, you need to enable Redis Keyspace Notification like following to subscribe expired event.

$ redis-cli config set notify-keyspace-events Ex

Also need to enable keyspace_notification of memory option in index.js like follows.

memory: {
    type: "redis",
    options: {
        url: process.env.REDIS_URL,
        keyspace_notification: true // default is false.
    }
}

Webhook supports following event at present.

LINE

• message
• follow
• unfollow
• join
• leave
• postback
• beacon

Facebook

• messages
• messaging-postbacks

If you deploy cluster of bot-express based application, you need to use redis as context store. Please refer to the document for detail.