tesco-bot-nexmo-over-ai: A JavaScript repository from enricop89

Introduction

Where is the closest Tesco supermarket? What are the tea brands sold at Tesco?

If you ever lived in the UK, you would have liked someone to ask the above questions. What if you can do it via WhatsApp?

This blog post will help you integrating Tesco API with Nexmo Messages API and Over AI Bot.

Getting started

Before you begin you'll need to install the Serverless Framework.

Serverless

You can install the Serverless framework directly from npm

# Install the serverless cli
npm install -g serverless

# Or, update the serverless cli from a previous version
npm update -g serverless

Serverless YML

The Yaml file describes the services that will be deployed on your aws account. In this case is a lambda function with his API Gateway associated.

functions:
  wa-inbound-webhook:
    handler: functions/wa-inbound-webhook.handler
    events:
      - http:
          path: wa-inbound
          method: post
          cors: true

Deploy the service on your AWS account

To deploy the service on your AWS account, you simply need to create an IAM role with capabilities of creating, updating and delete Lambda and API Gateway services.

Configure your AWS Profile: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-configure-files.html
Create your local config file. Create a config.json file with your credentials (Nexmo, Tesco and Over AI Credentials). Please check the config.example.json file.
Run serverless deploy --aws-profile {yourAwsProfile}

Repeat step 3 if you want to update the functions.

Live Demo

Give it a try 😎

Scan the following QR Code and send your first message:

Open a WhatsApp Conversation with +44 7418 342149
Send the following keyword: enricop-blog-post-1
Send the first message. For example, Hi Bot.

Local development

When you are developing, you don't want to push every single code change to AWS.

You can use serverless invoke local to test your function locally. Please check package.json for example on how to use it.

Conclusion

So what did we learn in this post?

We created an integration between OverAI bot and Nexmo Messages (WhatsApp). We created three main intents and pull data from an external API (Tesco API) to enable the bot to reply with additional information.

This flow can be implemented and integrated with any external API so the use cases are infinite!

enricop89/tesco-bot-nexmo-over-ai