COVID Info Centre Facebook Chatbot

This project is a Facebook Messenger bot which aims to deliver information about the pandemic COVID-19. By using this code as a template any government and healthcare services can provide their service to the public.

Overview

This Bot provides the following features,

Latest News
Provide Helpdesk Number
Statistics About The Spread
FAQs
Precaution Measures
Advice By Doctors

How a user can use the bot?

Go to the chat page in Messenger.
Click on the GET STARTED button to start the conversation.
You can use the menu present in the chat to send messages quickly.

Sample phrases that the user can use,

Tell me about the latest news.
What is the helpline number?
What are the precaution measures I can follow?
show me the FAQs.
show me the advice of the doctors.

Multi-language support

This bot can support multiple languages. Currently, It is trained in English and Tamil. We can train the bot in other languages as well in the future.

The bot will fetch the user's language preference from their phone and Facebook account's language settings option. If the user has un-supported language, then English will be used.

To add the language strings used within the bot, Goto <project_dir>/facebookBot/strings.rb file and add the required strings with the language code as the key element.

Wit.ai is used as an NLP agent to handle the user's messages. To train our bot in more languages, we need to train the Wit.ai models and add the access tokens in .env file.

For developers

Requirements to deploy this chatbot

Ruby
Online hosting server
Wit Project (For Natural Language Processing)

Getting started

First, you'll need to fork and clone this repo

Open Terminal. Change the current working directory to the location where you want the cloned directory to be created.

git clone https://github.com/Balaji-Ramasubramanian/COVID-Info-Centre-Bot

Let's get all our dependencies setup:

 bundle install

Configuration

You need to change the .env file with your appropriate access tokens, usernames, and passwords. You need to add the following details,

The Facebook page access token
Verify token for your Facebook app
App secret token
Wit access token

Setting up the API endpoints for data input

For data input, you can use an API endpoint. If you're using sheets for data input. You can use sheets to API converter like Sheety.

You can refer this google sheet for input data reference. Make sure your API endpoints having the same response format as mentioned in this doc.

The API endpoints should be set in apiendpoints.rb file. The following endpoints should be present

NEWS_URL=#News endpoint
FAQ_URL=#FAQ endpoint
HELPDESK_NUMBER_URL=#Helpdesk instructions endpoint
ABOUT_THE_VIRUS_URL=# About the virus
DOCTORS_ADVICE_URL=#Doctors advice
PREVENTION_METHODS_URL=#Advice by doctors

Deploying your app:

Test your project locally

Download ngrok in your local system.

Open the terminal and navigate to the project folder

run rackup -p <port_number>.

Open another window in the terminal

run <path_of_ngrok_file> http <port_number>

copy the URL with 'https://' prefix. This is your webhook URL that serves your program.

Deploying with Heroku:

You need to have Heroku CLI installed to deploy the bot in Heroku. To find more details about Heroku CLI, click here.

You can follow this link to set up the Heroku environment for the project.

Create an app in Facebook

Goto developers.facebook.com
Login using your Facebook account username and password.
Select 'Add New App' under the 'My Apps' section.
Give a suitable name for your bot and click submit.
Click 'set up' in Messenger product. Within the Messenger product, Select the page you want to add this chatbot and set up a webhook.

Add webhook URL to your Facebook App

In developers.facebook.com, Navigate to your app's dashboard and click 'webhook' under the products section. Click the 'Edit Subscription' button and Paste the Webhook URL over there.

Note Don't forget to append '/webhook' after the URL (since config.ru file mapped to the path '/webhook').

https://<YOUR_URL>>/webhook

Or you can modify your config.ru file in your project to map whatever URL path you want.

How to add test users?

Test the app during the development phase

During the development phase, only the admins of the bot and the test users who are added by the admins can use the bot. Admins of the chatbot can add more Facebook users and also add test users through their app's dashboard.

Add new roles to the bot

To add new roles, Navigate to the app's dashboard on Facebook developer's page. Click on Roles -> Roles. On this page, we can add Facebook users to anyone of the roles of admin/developer/tester/analytic user.

Add test users

Test Users are temporary Facebook accounts that you can create to test various features of your app. To add test users for your app, Navigate to Roles -> Test Users and click on add/edit test user accounts.

Publishing the app

To publish the chatbot, we need to submit our app for the Facebook review. To do that, click on App Review -> start a submission.

After publishing the app, any Facebook users can access it by directly sending messages to the corresponding Facebook page that hosts the chatbot.

Contribute

Simple 3 step to contribute to this repo:

Fork the project.
Make the required changes and commit.
Generate a pull request. Mention all the required descriptions regarding the changes you have made.

Author

Balaji Ramasubramanian

If you need any help in customizing and deploying this project, email me @ balaji030698@gmail.com

Balaji-Ramasubramanian / COVID-Info-Centre-Bot