Bots FAQ

How do bots work with pimentaCHAT?

Bots (aka Chatbots) are pieces of software that provide automated messaging in a chat platform. They are useful for running scripted interactions to provide support, conversational workflow or on-boarding and can be integrated with external services. In pimentaCHAT, each bot has a user account that it logs in with just like a human. We give these users a bot role so that its nature is obvious to other users and it can have specific permissions.

What kinds of bots work with pimentaCHAT?

We are building out support for multiple bot frameworks and platforms, starting with other open source projects. We currently have adapters for bBot, Hubot, Botkit and Botpress.

We refer to these as external bots, because their hosting and logic is separate to your pimentaCHAT instance and defined by their provider. External bots are suited to messaging-heavy interactions and/or where maintenance or processes are independent of pimentaCHAT.

We are also working on a model for internal bots, that run as an app attached to the instance and are tightly coupled with the architecture of pimentaCHAT. These (at least currently) have limited features for conversational UI, but might provide deeper integration with the messaging platform. These are best used to provide simple command driven interfaces for your pimentaCHAT users.

How are bots hosted?

The hosting for external bots depends on the platform. Hubot for instance, runs on any Node.js environment, but you have to set it up yourself (services like Heroku or Glitch are popular for that use case). Bot platforms like Botkit provide their own services for hosting and provisioning bots, they just need configuration to connect to your pimentaCHAT instance.

Internal bots are hosted as part of the pimentaCHAT instance (either on-premise or in the same cloud container). Their provisioning and operation is dependent on the pimentaCHAT server.

How do bots send and receive messages?

pimentaCHAT is built on Meteor, which provides utilities for streaming updates to data collections. Every user in pimentaCHAT has such a collection for their messages and bots subscribe to the collection of messages for their user account, creating a stream that is updated every time a message is sent either directly to them or any room they are joined in.

For more details, see the Bots Architecture section