Create a chatbot app2/14/2024 Writing Parking Assisstant, a Prototype WhatsApp Chatbot (To be fair, there is also the risk that new features may limit functionality or create breaking changes that require more development effort, so think carefully before implementing business-critical tasks). Then I realized that every time a chat platform would introduce a new feature, my app would immediately benefit from it. The message would go out soon enough, when the user would go to an upper level where wifi was better. I didn’t need to add offline support using manifest files: WhatsApp gave it to me out of the box. No need for an authentication system-I was using the user’s phone number as identification. The chatbot was able to send messages to users without me needing to register devices, use PubSub or similar services for push notifications, or save user tokens. apk, no Xcode, no App Store, nor Google Play. If it is working in a chat emulator, it would work everywhere. Not only that, I no longer needed a complicated CI/CD process. It was so easy and fast to add new features, and I didn’t even need to do end-to-end testing. Immediately after I started developing the new parking assistant chatbot, I realized how fantastic the idea was. All I had to do was dig into how to make a WhatsApp chatbot. By using their resources and developing only a small engine for answering questions, that would leave the hard work of maintainability to chat platform developers. It’s important to remember that the developers of chat platforms like Telegram or WhatsApp had worked days and nights for years to ensure the stability of their apps. Drivers wanted to get push notifications if someone was blocking them, instead of opening the web app every time before leaving.Drivers wished to send messages to the blockers instead of opening the phone dialer.It didn’t work underground (where the parking is-there is no good mobile signal there).The app didn’t work well on some old mobile phones.I got some feedback on the regular web app, and I believed it might address it if I were to create a WhatsApp chatbot: Would users prefer to use chatbots? Would I need to give less support? Would it introduce any new meta-features simply by leveraging different infrastructure? I started to think that maybe the world was moving toward chatbots, so I should experiment. Around that time, I also started to see Google Assistant everywhere. The next day, my brother bought an Amazon Echo, featuring Alexa. One day, Facebook announced that they are going to release an API for WhatsApp. Less than one day of development helped and saved time for many people-a good investment. If they clicked on a registered slot, they would see the relevant contact details and could choose to call the driver. If they were already parked, it would take the data from the browser’s local storage. Users would see all parking spots and click on an empty one to fill in their details. The database was FireBase, so we had realtime support and JSON support, and no need for a back end. It was hosted by using GitHub’s free static page hosting. No webpack and no JS bundles at all! Just vanilla JavaScript. To make the process better, I created a web app. If so, they would have to call the other driver and hope that they were not in the middle of a meeting so they could go and move their car out of the way. ![]() Before leaving the office, a driver had to check whether anyone was blocking their car. ![]() All drivers marked where they were parking, and their names and phone numbers. ![]() From a Whiteboard to a Web Appīefore there was an app, there was a big board. In every double-parking space, the first driver parks inside, and the second parks outside. The parking space is very limited, so people park in spaces intentionally designed for double-parking, where one car is blocking another. The company I worked for had an office for around 2,000 employees in the middle of downtown Tel Aviv. And beyond: Will chatbots one day replace all traditional apps? Chatbots have so much potential! In this WhatsApp chatbot tutorial, I wanted to share my learning journey, best practices I discovered, and my predictions on the app vs. What would happen if I were to create a WhatsApp chatbot to solve the specific use case, instead of a web app? Would people like it better? Would it be more useful?īut the story is much bigger than that. Feedback on the web app prompted me to do an experiment. Long ago, I built a web app for an enterprise (200k+ employees).
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