dennyabrain
commented
3 months ago Built a proof of concept chat bot to see what its like to build directly with the whatsapp cloud API. Some screenshots from the bot
What you see here is a simple chat bot responding to user's messages with static and interactive messages.
By doing this, I was able to identify 4 verticals, we'd have to work on if we were to build our own message deliveyr solution for Whatsapp.
1. Account Management
- Tattle’s Business Account Verification
- Migrating Numbers from Gupshup to Kabootar
- Keeping up with changes on Meta’s platform
- Managing Payment on behalf of client
- Unknown Unknowns
2. API Integration
- Send and receive messages
- Manage Templates
3. Low/No code Journeys
- Define Flexible Journeys in backend code
- Define Flexible Journeys in GUI
I built a proof of concept for both of these. Created an easy to configure Journey module and customizable blocks in Elixir to evaluate the feasibility of building low/no code chat bot builder. Did similar exploration in UI using low level libraries from d3.js. For the scope of our current requirements, building a low/no code system seems like an overkill, but I felt this exploration was useful to see how feasible it would be to build this if there's demand for it.
4. Infrastructure Management
- Responsible for scale
- Responsible for maintaining Meta Compliance
While we have figured out how to auto-scale given known surge events, handling unexpected surge events would be challenging for this project alone. This project alone does not have the messaging volumes to justify keeping some servers hot 24/7. So just for that reason, it might not be worthwhile to spin up our own message delivery service.
Requirments
What we will require to host
- devops engineer : scaling, observability, incident management, resilience
- backend engineer :
- frontend engineer : a low/no code journey builder thats a delight to use will require serious commitment to frontend dev
- whatsapp/meta infra/account/payment expert : someone to keep up with changing meta guidelines and requirements
Work has begun on this repository - https://github.com/tattle-made/kabootar/ Upon pushes to the repository, new version of the package and its documentation is released on https://hexdocs.pm/kabootar/