Yowl

Fast, minimal, multi-platform chatbot framework for NodeJS

Example - A Simple Echo Bot

var yowl = require('yowl');
var bot = yowl();

bot.name = "Echo Bot";

var local = require('yowl-platform-cli');
bot.extend(local);

bot.use(function(context, event, callback) {
  var message = event.message;
  event.send(message, callback);
});

bot.run();

$ npm install yowl yowl-platform-cli
$ node bot.js --local

Complex Example - A Reminder Bot

Reminder Bot - Leverages a combination of yowl packages to create a bot that allows users to set reminders for themselves.

Installation

$ npm install yowl --save

About

Yowl is a chatbot framework that is structured in a similar way to express.

It is unopinionated and comes with very little out of the box. It allows you to chain together middleware that helps you do things like

• connect to chat platforms
• run classifiers on in-bound messages
• add persistentence
• structure and manage multi-message dialogs

Middleware

This is not necessarily an exhaustive list but rather a good starting point for tools you can use to build your bot.

Platforms

To talk to your users, bots need to integrate with outside platforms.

• yowl-platform-cli - allows you to interact with a bot via the command line by using the --local flag
• yowl-platform-facebook - quickly deploy a bot to facebook messenger
• yowl-platform-ws - provide a bot interface directly via websocket, includes javascript client library

planned middleware: telegram platform, sms platform

Context Persistence

You will most likely want to maintain an on-going state for interactions your users have with your bot. These modules take care of that.

• yowl-session-memory - in-memory session persistence. good for getting up and running with a development environment or for testing.
• yowl-session-redis - good for bots that don't need to keep a lot of session information and need quick session access.
• yowl-session-rethink - good for deployed bots that may benefit from rethinkdb's ease of operation/scaling

Interaction Locking

Often you'll wait your bot to perform an asynchronous call to an external API or send multiple messages in reply to a user query. Locking allows you to limit a user to one active request at a time.

• yowl-lock-redis - locking backed by redis, based on the nodejs redlock implementation

planned middleware: in-memory locking

Interaction Management

Bots aren't useful if they can't handle multi-step interactions with your users.

• yowl-dialog-manager - a structured approach for defining and chaining dialogs, making it easier to create complex workflows for your bot

Scheduled/Async Jobs

Often, you'll want to schedule some processing and messaging to take place asynchronously or at some point in the future.

• yowl-jobs-kue - Job runner/scheduler that leverages kue under the hood.

Text Parsing

You're going to need to make sense of text.

• yowl-parse-dates - Parse dates from natural language text strings
• yowl-classifier-bayes - Naive bayes classifier for assigning categories to messages

Examples

Examples can be found at brianbrunner/yowl-examples.

People

The author of Yowl is Brian Brunner

License

MIT