Miss Fletcher, the Chatbot

A chatbot, powered by Wit.ai, used to search notamagazine.xyz's archives

Not A Magazine (you can read more about it here was a news aggregator about design. It used Twitter APIs to collect interesting articles about design from several different sources. All the collected articles where automatically tagged using NLP (Wit.ai) and presented together in the form of a web magazine.

At some point, I wanted to try integrating the generated news into Slack. I wanted to be able to access them directly from one of the tools I used on daily basis. It was my first test with chatbots, and I was very excited. I aimed to create a free text chatbot, without any pre-defined choice, and wanted it to understand natural language.

Before integrating it to Slack, I created a simple web interface, to test how the interactions with the AI worked. I created a basic one-pager powered by ReactJS, and a minimal REST backend in PHP to act as a broker between the UI and Wit.

The results were great! However I eventually decided to retire Not A Magazine, along with Miss Fletcher. All that remains is this video, one of Miss Fletcher's initial test-drives.