Luc Bors Weblog

In my previous post I described how to use node-red to interact with twitter. That post was based on some initial research which was eventually used as a basis for the post that you are reading now. For one of our projects I had to setup an Oracle Chatbot on twitter. Now as you might know, Oracle Digital Assistant supports many channels, such as web, facebook, android and iOS, but twitter is not supported. The way to expose a chatbot to a 'not supported' channel is to use a channel of the webhook type. In this post I describe how I created a working prototype that exposes an Oracle Digital Assistant to Twitter. The things you need for this are the following: Twitter application which is needed to use the Twitter API's to interact with twitter A nodejs application where you code the functionality A Digital Assistant instance to hold the Bot Installation of ngrok to test from your local machine Create a twitter application If you have an approved twitter develop...

Recently I had to setup an application that was able to read twitter and, based on some predefined keywords,  had to reply to specific tweets. I decided to have a look at node-red to set this stuff up. It proofed to be rather straightforward and easy to implement. The hardest part was to get approval for a twitter developer account. In this post I describe how I used node-red and how I implemented the interaction with twitter. What is node-red, and how to use it? Node-RED  ( https://nodered.org/ ) is a programming tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways. It provides a browser-based editor that makes it easy to wire together flows using the wide range of nodes in the palette that can be deployed to its runtime in a single-click.  You can use node-RED in many ways, but for the purpose of this demo I decided to run it in a docker image. I used the way described here ( https://hub.docker.com/r/nodered/node-red-docker...

Just a short blogpost describing a solution that I needed for the bot that I'm currently developing. This bot has a typical requirement doing different things during office hours and after closing time. As such I need to know when the user is invoking the bot. Here's how I ended up doing this. What time is it? The developer guide has a section on how to use Built-In FreeMarker Date Operations (see resources below). That is a very resource. I started with using the 'now'  variable, combined with date time. That should return me exactly what I want. So in oBotML that looks like: Unfortunately when I use 'now' to get access to the date-time, it will return the date-time of the server that hosts the actual Bot. This means I cannot use that date-time because it is not the correct date/time of the user's location. After doing a bit of research, I found that the profile property enables your bot to recognise a user’s name, local, and local time.  Alt...

Recently I have been working on a customer chatbot project. Although it was not a direct requirement, I decided to look into embedding the chatbot in a web application too. You will never know what the future brings. It struck me that is I could not find any blogposts related to this topic. The only thing is a youtube video by Oracle PM (see resources below) describing how to do this. There can be several reasons as why this has not been blogged about: Nobody is doing chatbot integration in a Javascript UI yet. Oracle Documentation is clear enough. It is very simple so why bother blogging. Anyway, despite of any of these reasons, I decide to write a post on this topic, so that at least I can refer to this myself whenever I need it. So here it is: How to integrate a chatbot in your JET application. This post does not go into the details of creating a chatbot, it just explains how to integrate one in you JET application (or any other Javascript application fo that matter). Wha...