[Question] Roadmap

[mrredbit]

1. Is there a roadmap of Bottr?
2. What are the next coming features?
3. Is the a plan to support non plain text reply of different platform? i.e. Buttons, Carousel... etc.

[killix]

for the 3. #79 can help.

[jcampbell05]

@mrredbit so I have started a milestone in the project but here are our list of features we wish to release in 0.2.

• Full support for functionality across all platform, #79 will help us here so we can focus on higher level features. Currently we are waiting on some changes to make it easier to integrate as well as a Websocket client.
• i81n the ability to localize the stuff sent by your bot with a built in localization system.
• Topics the ability to control what the discussion of the conversation i.e Useful for asking for the users age and waiting for the response.
• Push Events the ability to push messages from the bot to a conversation if something happens, useful for newsletters or reports.
• Traits the ability to change the way the bot communicates to your user depending on the capabilities of the platform, so if you are talking to the user via a non-graphical interface you can have your bot convert the graphics you might of sent into text descriptions.
• As well as additional tweaks like making the API naming consistent and adding support for promises etc in our APIs for things like downloading files and sending messages.

Some of these features I'm thinking of breaking into several 0.1.X releases (For example Topics and i81n) as I don't want to slow these down any further.

@mrredbit is there any features you would like ?

[mrredbit]

@jcampbell05 do you want any change to the Web UI? Right now I am trying to implement a simple chatbot UI on web. Depending on how it works out, I might be able to contribute on the web part in the future, but I couldn't say for sure.

Personally, I have some thoughts about the current web component:

1. Unlike normal IM bot, which the bot always occupying the full screen, a web bot should be more flexible IMO, sometimes it can occupy the full screen (e.g. in mobile), while sometimes it can be just a component which can be easily plugged into any area of a website or even in a popup.
2. Developers might want to customise the style of the bot, but the current implementation doesn's allowed that, because the UI of the bot is fixed.

I would suggest making the web UI presentation layer separate from the data layer, while Bottr provide the webhook, developer can decide how to hook up the data to their presentation layer, we can then separate the web UI part as another react component, allowing developer to customize the style by passing parameter into the react component.

[jcampbell05]

@mrredbit I would love some contributions on the web UI, I totally agree and it would make it much easier to maintain if it was split out like that.

I would love to have it customizable to the point we could embed it in the Bottr website.