#Telegram chatbot builder upgrade

I was paying this out of my own pocket, but since it was a passion project, the cost didn’t matter much. I first upgraded it to the SGD 10/month plan, then to SGD 85/month plan with some plugins.

#Telegram chatbot builder upgrade

It took me a whole weekend, almost 48 hours, to set up the first functioning prototype.īus Uncle's Day 1 Tech Architecture It started costing me moneyĪs the chatbot’s audience grew to about 22,000+ unique users in under 2 months, the load on computing resources also grew, so I had to upgrade my free Heroku plan. I hosted the Bus Uncle codebase on the free plan of my then favourite PaaS Heroku.

Using Wit.ai allowed people to speak freely with the bot instead of having to type slash commands like '/start'. I got my bus timings from the LTA DataMall API, and used a bit of the Wit.ai API for NLP (Natural Language Processing). I didn't like to use chatbot libraries like node-telegram-bot-api or python-telegram-bot for various reasons. The first version of Bus Uncle was made on a scrappy NodeJS express-server connected to the Facebook Messenger APIs. I remember googling 'How to make a chatbot say hi' around August 2016.

I had zero experience in building chatbots before. Bus Uncle's initial user growth The tech was simple Just one post from Mothership, the country’s largest social journalism website, and our user base skyrocketed. Users shared screenshots of their Bus Uncle chats with their friends and our user base grew quickly. Chatbots were novel, and the audience could relate to Bus Uncle’s personality of a quirky Singaporean uncle who was guai lan (snarky), told uncle jokes, and spoke fluent Singlish (Singaporean English). When my co-founder Yin Yin and I launched Bus Uncle on Facebook Messenger in late 2016, it grew unexpectedly viral.