Info Bot

In remote areas where cellular 3G connectivity is more difficult to come by, it is often difficult to perform quick online lookups; one example being looking up the short-term weather to inform hiking decisions.

This is a simple client intended to be deployed as a Twilio SMS webhook that performs quick lookups based on a textual query. Backed by an AWS Lambda function, this allows the user to offload the desired network request to a serverless platform.

Sample Utterances

• "Weather in Yosemite"
• "Forecast 36.508, -118.575"
• "Wiki Half Dome"
• "Give me a quotation!"

Key Dependencies

• claudia-bot-builder - A JS framework to help create and deploy chat bots for various platforms (such as Twilio) to AWS Lambda.

Installation & Deployment

1. Clone this project.
2. Create an AWS profile named claudia (used in package.json scripts) with the following IAM programmatic access permissions.
   • AWSLambdaFullAccess
   • IAMFullAccess
   • AmazonAPIGatewayAdministrator
3. Add the profile keys to .aws/credentials (Reference).
4. Install node 6.10.* to match the Lambda execution environment. Use nvm to manage multiple node versions, if needed.
5. Make sure you have npm installed globally.
6. In the command prompt run the following commands.

$ cd `project-directory`
$ npm install

4. To create the cluadia configuration.

$ npm run create

5. To configure and store Twilio account access keys and tokens into the API Gateway stage variables. This will result with a list of webhooks to the Lambda function that can be called when a message comes into the desired Twilio phone number.

$ npm run update -- --configure-twilio-sms-bot

References

• Claudia Hello World Chatbot
• Claudia Bot Builder API
• Create an SMS Bot on AWS Lambda with Claudia
• AWS JS SDK Configuration

Future Work

• Integrate WolframAlpha textual querying