Evaluate the time and effort needed to build a connection to a Whatsapp bot
Popolechien opened this issue · comments
Context: contact is distributing e-books and examination papers to people in areas with low connectivity (South Africa / Uganda).
He's asked for a zim file (can be done via Nautilus) that can either be distributed or also queried via a whatsapp bot (they are using wati.io). The way it's been described the bot would offer a list of contents (files) as menu items, and based on user choice would send the corresponding file in return.
We've seen people use Kiwix-serve and feed it into a whatsapp bot already, though they were using PickyAssist for the whatsapp end of things. Here's their feedback :
_ "What we did was fetch content from kiwix server, then remove HTML since WhatsApp doesn't understand that. And then we added the little conveniences like allowing a user to read large pages in small chunks and that about it._
_Really the hard part is getting access to WhatsApp and then building a bot in general. After that, its as easy as adding any other functionality to your bot." _
Questions:
- assuming we are given access to the wati backend, how much work would be needed to plug Kiwix-serve into their whatsapp bot?
- Wouldn't this scenario only make sense if the bot is used to query more than one zim? (e.g. nautilus-based + wikipedia)
- If we skip the Kiwix-serve part, can we still build it, and how long would it take?
Wati.io is down for the moment, no clue how it works. To make evaluation we need to know the uses cases. Which features should have this tool? Input/putput detailed. In principle I don’t see any big problem but without details about the platform and the features, this is impossible to provide numbers.
works for me
This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be now be reviewed manually. Thank you for your contributions.
@Popolechien Should we keep this ticket open?
Yes please.
This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be now be reviewed manually. Thank you for your contributions.
@Popolechien Whatbis the perspective here? I‘m not sure to understand where we go.
@kelson42 that was four years ago and we haven't heard of whatsapp bots becoming a thing, I think we can close this ticket.