Val

An chatbot for running my life. Based on Hubot, but with multiple simultaneous adapters. Currently Alexa, Twilio, and Slack are supported.

Hosts the backend for a magic mirror and a recipe app currently. More to come soon :)

Dev

npm install -g watchify browserify

npm start

Docs

Plugin

A simple boilerplate plugin is available at plugins/pluginStarter.ts.

`hear()/respond()` patterns

When registering a callback for your plugin, you can specifiy the trigger as any time the bot sees the phrase (hear()) or only when the phrase is directed to the bot (respond()). Both take one of three types of triggers: a regex, an exact string match, or a string with slots.

regex:

robot.hear(/hello/, {}, (res: Response) => {
  res.send(res.envelope, "Hello there!");
});

exact string:

robot.hear("Hello", {}, (res: Response) => {
  res.send(res.envelope, "Hello there!");
});

Choice slots

You can present a list of possible strings to match by separating them with a "|" inside the slot syntax. If you add a "|" as the last character, the match will be optional.

// This will match "hello there", "hi there", "hello", and "hi"
robot.hear("{hello|hi} {there|}", {}, (res: Response) => {
  res.send(res.envelope, "Hello there!");
});

Typed slots

You can also match a few provided slot types:

// This will match "what is the price of dogecoin" or "what is the price of BTC"
robot.hear("what is the price of {:WORD}", {}, (res: Response) => {
  res.send(res.envelope, "Wow. Much sent! Such spend!");
});

// This will match "send 948 dogecoins"
robot.hear("send {:NUMBER} dogecoins", {}, (res: Response) => {
  res.send(res.envelope, "Wow. Much sent! Such spend!");
});

// This will match "simon says Do A Barrel Roll"
// Be careful, because this will likely match to the end of the string
robot.hear("simon says {:MULTIWORD}", {}, (res: Response) => {
  res.send(res.envelope, "Wow. Much sent! Such spend!");
});

Async/Await Express

Robot contains a function to wrap Robot.router Express functions to make them handle async/await correctly called expressWrap(). Simply wrap the callback function you give to the router in this wrapper and you can use async/await as you'd expect.

async function hello() {
  return 'hello world~';
}

robot.router.get('/hello', robot.expressWrap(async (req) => {
  return await hello();
}));

Cron

Robot exposes a method cron() which allows you to have a function executed on a schedule. This is easier to use than something like setTimeout, because you can specify at which time (wall time, rather than in X milliseconds) you want your function executed at. For example:

// The function takes a name, a cron schedule, and callback.
robot.cron('6am logging', '0 6 * * *', () => {console.log("It is 6am!")});

In this example, the console.log will happen at 6am every day. See cron syntax for more information on specifying a schedule.

The timezone will be whatever is specified via CRON_TIMEZONE in your config file or environment variables.

joshgachnang/val

Val

Dev