Create Your Own Auto-Response Bot with Bottr

By Jake Rocheleau. in Toolkit. Updated on July 22, 2022.

Most of us remember the Microsoft Tay incident where Internet users taught an AI bot some pretty crazy words in just a few days. It’s a funny example of bots on the web, but you can make your own Twitter or FB messaging bot without the AI stuff.

Bottr is a free open source library for creating bots from scratch. It labels itself “the world’s simplest bot framework” and I have to agree.

The whole stack runs on JavaScript, so you can build a custom bot using frontend ECMAScript on top of Express.js and Node.js.

Unfortunately, Bottr is not a complete AI framework. It can accept AI concepts but it won’t have deep learning out of the box. Instead, you can program events where Bottr can respond or pass information to API.ai.

The most practical usage would be internal team collaborations or idea sharing with Facebook Messenger. But probably the most fun project is creating a Twitter bot that automates responses, retweets, or just listens for tweets containing certain keywords or hashtags.

Botting is not a new technology but it certainly hasn’t been around for that long. Bottr is the best of its kind with a complete open source library on GitHub, ready for use. And you can find dozens of live bot examples like @DearAssistant on Twitter.

You can also find plenty of examples in this repo but for some reason, the live versions have been taken offline. I’m guessing they were eating up server resources and couldn’t be hosted for free.

If you wanna dive into Bottr then browse through the installation guide to set up your service and build your features. If you’re having trouble or want some help with bugs/errors you can look through the issues tab on GitHub.