Reviewing BotPress on Clever Cloud

This week, Benjamin Plouzennec & Antoine Cailly, Devs @ Zenika tell us about the chatbot they made for the BreizhCamp 2017, which is hosted on Clever Cloud.

Can you introduce your bot?

Breizhbot is a chatbot that quickly delivers information about the next talks during the event. We don't always plan in advance which talks we'll attend to so we often have to make a quick choice before the next round of talks. What's great about chatbots is that they are efficient! Very simple interaction and very optimized content delivery.

Which framework did you use?

We had the choice! Many big companies launched their framework and many more startups and open source projects appeared last year. But we wanted two things: easily connecting to several platforms and customizing the bot. For the first, we used Microsoft Bot Framework API to connect to Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack and to publish a web UI. For the second we prefered using an open source framework called botpress that offers an evolutive architecture and has a nice community 🙂 As a proof of that, the connector between botpress and Microsoft Bot Framework didn't exist so we did it and published it.

How did you discover Clever Cloud?

We discovered it with Quentin Adam, a regular speaker in events we're attending to, and Benjamin already had a project hosted on Clever Cloud, My Virtual Story Book.

What do you like most on Clever Cloud?

Easy, the simplicity!

As for our bot, the workflow is very efficient. We just linked our github repository, quickly tweaked the scalability params, added some environment vars and that was it: we had a chatbot up and running!

What features are you expecting the most?

For the moment the platform perfectly fits our needs.

How would you describe Clever Cloud to someone who doesn't use it yet?

Nice service, nice doc, nice people.