Creating a private Facebook Messenger chatbot

If you need a bot for your personal home automation, then this post describes how to achieve what is perceived as a private bot on Facebook's Messenger platform.

Not exactly a private bot

With private, I'm referring to bots that are not possible to be found by others or won't interact with others. These sort of bots are meant usually for some personal automation, where the bot act as the delivery entity to you or your family.

On my previous post Creating a private Telegram chatbot, a comment was raised about the "private" nature of Telegram's bots. With private, I'm referring to a bot that though not private can help establish your very own private communication channel. You control who can interact with the bot and who not. If the bot is discoverable, then there is no functionality supported to others and most importantly, your communication is only visible to yourself or others you have invited.

Creating a Facebook page

On Facebook, everything is driven by a page. Organizations will create an organization page but as many do, we can also create own small pages. A page is always required for a Messenger bot to work. The page serves its purpose to establish an entry point of interaction with other parties of interest but it is also the entry point for any chat related communication and this is where the bot needs to plug-in. So for the purpose of this post, the page needs to be something very simple.

1. Navigate to Facebook Pages.
2. Click on Create a page and Community or Public Figure and Get Started.
3. Name the page Example Private Messenger Bot and as category choose something appropriate e.g. Personal Blog.
4. You can upload pictures for the page if you want to but it is not necessary.
5. The page should be ready like this Example Private Messenger Bot. Notice that the page can be discovered by others. Confirm this by navigating to your page with an incognito tab.
6. Go to Setting->General->Page Visibility and select Page unpublished and chose Other for reason with e.g. Personal Bot. Notice that the page is not available any longer on the incognito tab.
7. From Setting->Messaging use the Your Messenger URL to initiate a chat session with your page. This is the private session we need with our chatbot.

Creating the bot

Developing an actual bot on Messenger is quite complicated. You would need to create an application, submit policies to be able to get keys and tokens that would allow you to integrate with the page's application. For this reason, we'll keep this simple and use a service that makes things very simple. There are three options in order of complexity:

1. chatfuel
2. ManyChat
3. Dialogflow

Given that the purpose here is to create a simple private Messenger bot, I'll choose chatfuel for the purpose of this post. Just select Add blank bot on chatfuel and let's name it Example Private Messenger Bot as well.

The bot is now available and you can try a test chat with it by activating the Test Your Bot from the Automate panel within the bot's configuration.

Connecting the bot to your page

This is not necessary, but it helps that you can discover your bot from Messenger or Facebook through the page we just created. If this is your first time in chatfuel then this is straight forward when connecting first time chatfuel with Facebook. The trickier flow that I will explain is when you've already made this connection and you need to find the new page. I've chosen this flow because I ran into this problem when writing this post. I've already have another bot connected with another Facebook page and I couldn't find how to connect the Example Private Messenger Bot to its respected page.

1. Navigate to Facebook's Business Integration.
2. Select View and edit of the Chatfuel application.
3. Scroll down and select the Example Private Messenger Bot on each of the following sections:
   1. Manage your Pages.
   2. Manage and access Page conversations in Messenger
   3. Send messages from Pages you manage at any time after the first user interaction
   4. Show a list of the Pages you manage
   5. Log events on your Page's behalf and send those events to Facebook
4. Save.
5. Wait for a short time and then refresh chatfuel. If this doesn't work try to logout and login again.
6. Enter the Example Private Messenger Bot and select the Configuration panel from the left.
7. Notice that the Example Private Messenger Bot is listed with a Connect to Page button to the right which you activate.

That's it.

Integrating with Zapier

On my previous post Creating a private Telegram chatbot I've explained how to send messages to the bot. This allows for any integration with e.g. Zapier or Integromat. To demonstrate the ability to send messages to the Example Private Messenger Bot I'll show how to hook it up with Zapier which offers an integration. To keep it simple and focused on chatfuel and this post, I'll use a two-step zap.

1. Schedule by Zapier configured to activate every hour.
2. chatfuel configured to target a session with the Example Private Messenger Bot.

The Schedule by Zapier configuration is very easy and straightforward. Zapier is good at helping configuration with UI navigation. The chatfuel configuration is the trickier one and it compromises by two activities in the overall zap flow.

• Find a Subscriber in Chatfuel
• Send Text Message in Chatfuel

It will look like this:

To configure the Find a Subscriber in Chatfuel follow these steps:

1. Type or select chatfuel.
2. For the Choose Action Event, scroll down and select Find a Subscriber. This step is important and retrieves a value that helps target the session to send the message later on. In more advanced flow, this value is driven as a reaction to an incoming trigger.
3. For the Chatfuel account select Add a New Account which will open a page and there select the Example Private Messenger Bot to connect with.
4. For the Search Type there are multiple options. Let's choose the Search by {{messenger user id}} which is the user page-scoped ID (PSID).
5. For the User ID follow these steps to retrieve it:
   1. Make sure you have exchanged one or two messages with the bot.
   2. Navigate to chatfuel's Example Private Messenger Bot's page.
   3. Open the People panel and you should see your name on the list.
   4. Open your entry and scroll down to get the value from messenger user id which is the value to fill in the User ID on Zapier
6. Activate the TEST & REVIEW to confirm.

It will look like this:

To configure the Send Text Message in Chatfuel follow these steps:

1. Type or select chatfuel.
2. For the Choose Action Event field, select Send Text Message.
3. For the Chatfuel account field select the account that was created Chatfuel Example Private Messenger Bot.
4. For the Subscriber field select from the previous activity the Chatfuel User ID.
5. For the Message Tag field, just choose Update.
6. For the "Message Textfield, just enterTest from Zapier`.
7. Activate the TEST & REVIEW to confirm.

It will look like this:

And on Messenger it will look like this: