Hi Folks! I'm pretty excited to announce that Dialogflow CX - Slack SDK is accepting contributions this Hacktoberfest!

That's all well and good, but why do we need this SDK?

The motivation behind this SDK, was the slack community to be able to use dialogflow cx in the slack bots. Slack provides a multitude of rich features and APIs, including the bot kit UI, that gives life to conversations.

What is Dialogflow CX?

Google's Dialogflow CX is a conversational AI development platform, suited for creating chat bot flows. The uniqueness and simplicity of this platform lies in defining conversation flows with the user through pages with intents and fulfillments.

Why do we need a conversational AI for slack bots?

It's easy enough to create a bot on Slack and it also provides events subscription to any defined particular webhook which could be running on a Lambda function say, and that function could respond to the events sent and publish an appropriate message back to slack.

Now, the lambda function can further make use of Dialogflow CX to process the message event and get the intent of the conversation. Without an NLP, you'd probably be customising code in your lambda, checking for main keywords, to trigger a response webhook.

Dialogflow CX abstracts away the NLP for you.

So ultimately it all boils down to... what?

Using Dialogflow CX you can get the intent of the conversation. Using dialogflow CX session context, you can maintain the flow of conversation between bot and user. And using this SDK you can have all of that on slack.

That sounds cool, but why do you need contributions?

• As mentioned above, both Dialogflow CX and Slack provide a plethora of features, the full extent of which can be used in the SDK to build a strong base which the slack community can make full use of!
• Also currently, the SDK supports App Engine or Cloud functions deployment which can be extended to use other cloud providers as well!
• You are also welcome to add any issues/extensions as you feel would help.

Great, great, how do I start contributing? And will my contributions be accepted?

You can start by checking out the SDK first. Do go through the Contributing guideline as well. All contributions are welcomed and will be accepted provided the follow the contribution guildelines.

So what are you waiting for? Contribute and earn your Hacktoberfest Swag now!