I have built a Facebook chat bot on the Messenger platform for my 3rd year project. This bot was designed, in a team using the scrum methodology, to help students on campus by assimilating a range of useful articles of information to one place. The bot consisted of the following features:
- Give real time bus information and college shuttle bus times.
- Display information about gym and library facilities.
- Allow students to log into student email/moodle.
- Reply to the user in a human-like manner.
The bot was developed as a Node.JS app hosted on the Heroku PaaS and was integrated to the Facebook Messenger platform. Three API's were developed for the bus, gym and library services in order to decentralize the application and reduce resource usage. MongoDB was also used to store information about the college facilities. Natural language processing was also utilised to extract context and semantics from the users input.
