Chatbot

Chatbot to provide smart replies to messages

Summary

This service exposes a single endpoint accepts a bot identifier and a visitor written message. It returns a single reply corresponding to the highest predicted intent above the confidence threshold. In order to retrieve the list of predicted intents for a given message publicly available AI API has been used.

This application is written in Golang. The database used is MongoDB.

The code is written keeping in mind following qualities:

• Readable
• Testable
• Maintainable
• Extensible

Apart from this -

• Basic unit tests are written to demonstrate testing using Go's basic testing framework
• In order to run & check regardless of the environment the support for docker is provided
• Setup section in Readme is provided for all the setup & run instructions

Setup & Run

Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/ameykpatil/chatbot

The application can be run using a Docker container images built & setup using the Makefile.

Run the application

1. Ensure you are in the root directory of the repository.
2. Run make docker-up, this will start the required containers (http, mongodb)
3. Check if server is running by checking /ping (you should get pong as response)
   curl --request GET 'http://localhost:8000/ping'
4. Check the /replies api with several messages

curl --request GET 'http://localhost:8000/replies?bot_id=5f74865056d7bb000fcd39ff&message=Hello'
curl --request GET 'http://localhost:8000/replies?bot_id=5f74865056d7bb000fcd39ff&message=I can not access the app'
curl --request GET 'http://localhost:8000/replies?bot_id=5f74865056d7bb000fcd39ff&message=Okay'
curl --request GET 'http://localhost:8000/replies?bot_id=5f74865056d7bb000fcd39ff&message=It worked, thank you'
curl --request GET 'http://localhost:8000/replies?bot_id=5f74865056d7bb000fcd39ff&message=Bye'

Run the tests

Unit tests can be run using make

make test

Run the linter

Linter can be run using make
But golangci-lint will be needed to run it

make lint

Application Design

• Application has been designed & structured in a layered format. Following diagram should help to visualise the flow through different layers.

Handler : Handler defines how to handle specific request & return response. It makes use of Service layer for getting required processed details.

Service : This layer provides a service to get data from different sources & combine them in a more meaningful way.

API Client : It provides a way to access external api to get intents.

Storage : This layer provides a way to access database. In this case MongoDB.
Note: ReplyWriter is written just to load initial data, more recommended way is to implement properly the way Reader is implemented & then provide a POST api to create the data.

Enhancements

Using additional time we can add following things to an application

• POST /replies API to add replies to a database instead of current static set of replies
• Integration tests with mocked DB & third-party API
• If we know more specific way to choose intent from received intents, implementing that logic.
• If we know more specific way to choose reply, implement that logic.