We created a bot user through a combination of Slack's API and Google's dialogFlow that is able to understand user's requests to create reminders and meetings, as well as banter. The bot asks a user to grant access (read and write) to their google calendar, under the assumption that the user joined the slack workspace with a google account.
We used three parts of slack's API to produce this bot, and used the following scopes
- bot
- chat:write:bot
- chat:write:user
- users:read
- users:read.email
The RTM sets up a message server WebSocket with Slack. The RTMClient served as an event-listener for all events of type 'message' within the bot's scope.
The Web API Client handles request queueing, and allowed for us to send reponses synchronously.
In order to ask for user's confirmation of a reminder or meeting, or to resolve a conflict, we crafted attachment objects which were formatted as interactive components by Slack. The attachments had to include all information necessary to create an event after a user's confirmation, because Slack routes users responses to a post endpoint (of the developer's choosing).
Through repeated sentences and phrases, our team trained a dialogFlow for adding reminders and adding meetings, detecting slack users with slack ID syntax <@U123456>.
Using the npm package googleapis to handle oauth requests and credentials, we were able to insert and get events with limited pinging of Google's Calendar API.
- Coordinating between all of Slack's APIs and keeping requests to Google Calendar low.
- deploy to heroku - currently using ngrok
- send invites to individual users mentioned in meetings
- change confirm-cancel buttons to check mark or x mark with text (see interactive messages)
- deploy to slack, get feedback