Introducing the new IDE Bot Builder

New look

The new IDE Bot Builder is completely re-designed to give you the best coding experience. Now you can open multiple tabs in the same window, load different projects, jump to methods within your code and a whole lot more all in the cloud.

The user interface is customizable as well. You can modify the look and feel of the IDE to match other popular IDEs such as XCode, Eclipse and Dreamweaver as well.

Multi-file support

The new IDE Bot Builder now supports multiple files in a single project. This means you can write modular code, have separate class files and also use import existing libraries to your code.

Built-in Scripting Tool

A revolutionary feature of the new Bot Builder tool is the ability to create bot conversations using a scripting tool. This allows anyone to map out conversation paths between a bot and a user, without the need for any coding knowledge. And the best part? The user’s conversation has Auto-NLP enabled that matches it to the closest intent specified in the script file. The scripting tool uses Gupshup’s own ‘NLP on the fly’ API.

Here’s an example of a simple script that responds to the user who either wants to book a flight or rent a car.

[main]

Hello! I can help you book flights or rent cars.

Flight

do you want business or economy?

Rent a car

You’re in luck. We have many rental cars available!

The scripting tool also comes with entity extraction. You can define an entity in an intent and the tool automatically recognises and extracts entities during the conversation. Here’s an example of how you can do so:

[main]

Hello! I can help you book flights or rent cars.

flight

do you want business or economy?

I want to rent a {{color:red}} car

You’re in luck. We have many {{color}} cars available!

GitHub Integration

Each project can be integrated with GitHub which can be tracked from the project itself. You can see the status of each file in the project and choose to commit, log or create branches from the IDE Bot Builder.

Node Package Manager Support

The new IDE Bot Builder supports Node Package Manager. You can directly import Node modules using the npm GUI and also check for updates for previously installed packages. In the screenshot below you can see that the PubNub package was recently installed with the option to install the latest releases of other packages available.

Built-in Chat Widget

Test your chatbot out as you code it with the built-in chat widget. The chat widget even supports structured messages with buttons and menus such as the ones seen on Facebook Messenger, Viber etc. You can test the bot live in the IDE Bot Builder.

This is just a small snapshot of the new features in the IDE Bot Builder. Go through this guide for a comprehensive write up on using the new IDE Bot Builder and its features.