Disclaimer: This repository is not maintained anymore!

A robust, decision-tree backed chatbot framework to manage conversations via Facebook messenger.

   

This code was developed by the AXA REV research team to serve as prototype for a chatbot framework to handle complex dialogues which involve plenty of questions and answers.

Main features:

• Robust conversation flow based on directed graph (no loops or dead ends)
• Intuitive, mxGraph powered user interface which allows for rapid design and update of conversation flows
• Simple integration with Facebook messenger
• Multi-tenancy: Operate multiple chatbots within one framework
• User authentication using Devise and role-based user authorization using cancancan
• Action hooks: Integration of external APIs (including OAuth2 authentification)
• Off topics: Handle arbitrary messages with built-in NLP engine based on fastText

• Ruby 2.4.1+
• bundler, gem install bundler
• A database, e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle

Clone the respository and install the required gems:

bundle install

Generate secret keys for the development and test sections in config/secrets.yml:

rake secret

Create the database and load the schema:

rake db:setup

Open the Rails console with rails c and create your admin account:

User.create(email: "name@domain.com", password: "TOPSECRET_PASSWORD", password_confirmation: "TOPSECRET_PASSWORD", role: "admin")

Startup your local web server:

rails s

Login in at http://localhost:3000 and create your first click bot project.

• Create a Facebook page and setup a Facebook app
• In the Messenger section, create a page access token and add it to the settings of your click bot project. In the Webhooks section, edit the page subscription and provide your app's callback url and a random verification token
• Add the token to your click bot project's settings to complete the integration

For testing in your development environment, you will need to expose the Webhook url of your local server to the internet. This can be achieved using Ngrok.

Use action hooks in order to integrate any external web services. As blueprint you can customize the stub provided in lib/external_service.rb and call the service in the leaf node lib/chatbot.rb.

Use off-topics to handle arbitrary messages that go beyond the provided options.

• Install fastText in your environment
• Provide the path to the binary and also the path to the directory where you store the classifiers in config/classifiers.yml
• Download the text files of the pretrained vectors for the languages of your interest to a directory "pretrained_vectors" located in your fastText directory
• Create the off-topics you would like to manage, provide a few sample messages and train the classifier

For questions, please contact boris.ruf@axa.com.

Copyright (c) AXA Group Operations SAS

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.