Whilst working on my latest React coding challenge, a messaging client with sockets, I ran into the need for a simple backend to facilitate a bot conversation.

I've been spending quite some time lately scouring the internet for a free, easy-to-use conversational bot without much success. I tried to set up a bot service through Microsoft Azure, but it's definitely not an easy process and didn't get anywhere. There aren't really any API offerings either, certainly not any free ones.

Botty is a nodeJS based, socket server that provides basic automated conversations. There's no AI, no smarts or anything complex. You provide a dataset of request/responses and it uses string pattern matching to work out the most accurate response it can find. It's highly customisable and comes with a bunch of natural behaviours out the box, such as typing events and pauses. I've sourced a pretty good dataset with a bunch of basic responses to get started.

You can check Botty out on GitHub here or use the hosted version at https://botty-beep-boop.herokuapp.com. There's nothing like Botty available at the moment, and everything's open source.