Announcing Chatter: a library for making interactive chat bots on slack and more

We’ve long been making bots with hardware, now we’re making them with software too!

They started as simple one-off “report bots.” Basically, helpful commands that anyone in our Slack could use to show useful information like who’s out on a given day, or how much vacation time we’ve taken. We also made a bot where people could send a “thanks” message that would be aggregated into a weekly email for the whole team to see.

In the process, we started to see some patterns appearing. From basic things, like matching text and returning a response based on the message, to more complex things, like flood protection or nested hierarchies of commands with help and usage information.

After a fair bit of iteration, we’ve released chatter, a Node.js library containing a collection of useful primitives for creating interactive chat bots.

And, no surprise, it’s open source! Check it out on GitHub, contribute, and stay tuned here for more info!