Long ago, I built a web app for an enterprise (200k+ employees).
Feedback on the web app prompted me to do an experiment.
Would people like it better?
Would it be more useful?
But the story is much bigger than that.
Chatbots have so much potential!
And beyond: Will chatbots one day replace all traditional apps?
The company I worked for had an office for around 2,000 employees in the middle of downtown Tel Aviv.
In every double-parking space, the first driver parks inside, and the second parks outside.
All drivers marked where they were parking, and their names and phone numbers.
Before leaving the office, a driver had to check whether anyone was blocking their car.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
To make the process better, I created a web app.
Not even any UI framework.
No webpack and no JS bundles at all!
It was hosted by using GitHubs free static page hosting.
The user interface was straightforward.
Users would see all parking spots and tap on an empty one to fill in their details.
If they were already parked, it would take the data from the browsers local storage.
It was working great for almost a year.
Less than one day of development helped and saved time for many peoplea good investment.
The next day, my brother bought an Amazon Echo, featuring Alexa.
Around that time, I also started to see Google Assistant everywhere.
I started to think that maybe the world was moving toward chatbots, so I should experiment.
Would users prefer to use chatbots?
Would I need to give less support?
Would it introduce any new meta-features simply by leveraging different infrastructure?
All I had to do was dig into how to make a WhatsApp chatbot.
Immediately after I started developing the new parking assistant chatbot, I realized how fantastic the idea was.
Not only that, I no longer needed a complicated CI/CD process.
If it is working in a chat emulator, it would work everywhere.
No.apk, no Xcode, no App Store, nor Google Play.
No need for an authentication systemI was using the users phone number as identification.
Wownow thats a really good investment.
The simplest solution I found is to use a shared Twilio phone number.
Its just for developmentwhen moving to production, developers will want to use a dedicated phone number.
Twilios free numbers are each shared across many Twilio users.
Here isan exampleof sending a message using cURL:
This is a simple text message.
But you’ve got the option to also attach media (images, etc.)
Heres a Node.js example:
Thats it: Now we can start sending messages to clients!
During development, services like Ngrok or Serveo can provide public URLs that route to local developer machines.
Twilio WhatsApp messages look like this:
That is all we need.
Those are the basics of how to create a WhatsApp chatbot.
This is to prevent spam.
In Twilio, punch sender and configure.
Sending a message from a template is exactly like sending a regular message, using the same API.
WhatsApp automatically sees that it matches a template and approves the message.
It would be as easy as sending WhatsApp messages and attaching images.
Just imagine if users were able to attach real money to each WhatsApp message.
It would be very straightforward to buy things.
Users would easily be able to purchase anything by speaking with a suppliers chatbot.
Imagine a chatbot that replaces Waze or Google Maps.
You send it a text message of your destination.
Think about a Waze chatbot or a taxi chatbot instead of the Gett or Uber apps.
You send a message saying where you are, then the taxi arrives, and you pay using WhatsApp.
Some readers may be thinking, Dont users prefer graphical interfaces, and not just typing?
Facebook already supportsWebview for Messenger.
Users dont need to install anything, just use their preferred instant-messaging app.
And handles it well.
Chatbots should stick to short messages.
People dont read long messages.
Chatbots with personality are received better.
This WhatsApp chatbot tutorial didnt get into the specifics of parsing thenatural-language messagesusers will send to chatbots.
Best of luck with your own WhatsApp chatbot development!
