v0.2.0

Change Log

1. The Abot front-end is greatly improved and now sports a stylish new look.
   • There's now a training interface to train Abot on intents. Training data is centralized and stored on itsabot.org or self-hosted, enabling clustered deployments.
   • Added a response panel that enables admins to respond to users directly when Abot gets confused. Right now only SMS is supported but support for email and more is coming.
   • Added basic analytics to the admin dashboard. This will be improved upon in future releases.
   • Added a settings page to modify plugins without needing to add or modify environment variables.
   • Added basic first-run setup to create an admin account.
   • Added a team management page to designate other users as admins.
2. The command line utility has been dramatically improved. abot now supports plugin search, installation, upgrading, publishing, and scaffolding. For a full breakdown of available CLI commands, type abot plugin
3. Abot's core logic and use-cases have been improved.
   • Anyone can now message Abot without registering. Since authentication is needed so rarely (like with purchases), it's now the responsibility of plugins.
   • Abot automatically adds context to user messages, filling in pronouns and times based on knowledge about recent conversations. The natural language time parsing is still experimental but works in most cases.
   • In addition to Commands and Objects, Abot now automatically extracts People and Times into StructuredInput for every message.
   • When a user's message confuses Abot, Abot helpfully replies with some example queries it can perform based on Usage examples in each plugin's plugin.json.
4. The plugins API has been extended, making plugin development much easier and far less error prone.
   • Plugins can now listen for events in core, which are broadcasted globally. This allows plugins to modify requests when they're received and responses before they're sent (e.g. to translate from X -> English -> X) and track events for analytics and reporting.
   • We designed a user preferences system to enable you to easily share information about a user across plugins to prevent requesting the same info multiple times, like a user's name or shipping address.
   • Publishing plugins has been dramatically improved and now gives specific feedback as to why publishing a plugin failed.
   • Added an Iterate task, which enables plugins to easily let users iterate one-by-one through a set of options, like restaurants.
   • We built a continuous integration system for plugins, which will enable us to ensure plugins still work with the latest Abot changes.
   • Plugins can now schedule future messages to be sent to a user, such as reminders.
   • Plugins now all come with install instructions, which are automatically generated based on each plugin's needed settings variables.
   • Plugins can now be hosted via any go get-able source.
5. itsabot.org also has a number of improvements. The UI has been improved and stubbed-out features completed.
6. We also fixed a large number of bugs and laid the groundwork to enable consistently stable future builds.
   • We added automated tests and TravisCI integration.
   • Fixed deploys on Heroku.
   • Fixed the state machine for plugins.
   • Fixed several security issues.

We also added a number of first-party plugins available via https://www.itsabot.org/plugins:

• Driver: email
• Weather
• Reminders
• Restaurant recommendations
• Stocks