ISSUE.md

Chatbot Challenge 🤖

Build a Node.js program that communicates with a chatbot.

Welcome to the Rival technologies chatbot challenge 🎉! We are excited that you are interested in working with our team in Vancouver, BC and helping us expand our next gen market research platform.

To give you an idea of the kind of work we do, our engineering team developed a chatbot that is looking forward to communicating with you.

All you need to do is start a conversation and reply to the chatbot to keep the conversation going.

Acceptance Criteria

Anything we do is based on acceptance criteria, this chatbot challenge is no different. Here we go:

• Your program is written in Node.js.
• Your code is ready for production.
  • We prefer you prioritize the quality of your code over completing the tasks by hacking something together. You should be proud of your code and it should be easy to understand.
• Your replies are generic and not hard-coded.
  • Why? We provide you with a single conversation endpoint, but will run your program against different question sets during your on-site presentation.

Conversation Flow

The following flow diagram outlines the conversation flow visually:

API

The chatbot exposes an HTTPS endpoint at https://us-central1-rival-chatbot-challenge.cloudfunctions.net, referred to as the $BASE_URL. All URLs listed below are relative to this endpoint.

POST /challenge-register - Account Creation

The very first step is to create an account.

Request:

curl --request POST \
  --url $BASE_URL/challenge-register \
  --header 'content-type: application/json' \
  --data '{
	"name": "Jane Doe",
	"email": "jane@doe.com"
}'

Response:

{
  "user_id": "<YOUR USER ID>"
}

POST /challenge-conversation - Inititalize the conversation

In order to communicate with the bot, you need a conversation ID.

Request:

curl --request POST \
  --url $BASE_URL/challenge-conversation \
  --header 'content-type: application/json' \
  --data '{
	"user_id": "<YOUR USER ID>"
}'

Response:

{
  "conversation_id": "<YOUR CONVERSATION ID>"
}

GET /challenge-behaviour/<YOUR CONVERSATION ID> - Retrieve new messages

Use this endpoint to retrieve new messages. Once you answer a bot's question correctly, you can use this endpoint to continue the conversation and get the next question.

Request:

curl --request GET \
  --url $BASE_URL/challenge-behaviour/<YOUR CONVERSATION ID> \
  --header 'content-type: application/json'

Response:

{
  "messages": [{
    "text": "<The chatbot message>"
  }]
}

NOTE: The chatbot may reply with multiple messages. Your program can focus on the last element in the array to continue the conversation.

HINT: This is where you parse the chatbot's message, figure out how to reply and then get ready to reply back to the chatbot (see next chapter).

POST /challenge-behaviour/<YOUR CONVERSATION ID> - Reply to the chatbot

Once you've parsed the chatbot's messages and figured out how to reply, send your reply to the chatbot.

Request:

curl --request POST \
  --url $BASE_URL/challenge-behaviour/<YOUR CONVERSATION ID> \
  --header 'content-type: application/json' \
  --data '{
	"content": ""
}'

NOTE: The content property is always a string. If the bot asks you a "yes/no" question, simply reply with "yes" as the content value. If the bot asks for a list of elements, reply with a comma-separate list such as "banana,orange,pineapple". For numbers, the content property is still a string, e.g. {"content": "42"}.

Response:

{
  "correct": true | false
}

If the chatbot replies with true, it's time to retrieve the next message with the GET /challenge-behaviour/<YOUR CONVERSATION ID> endpoint documented above.

If you receive false, the chatbot didn't like your answer.

Resource file

There is a phase of interacting with a chatbot that requires you to look up data on sports teams. It has been included in this zip package and called: sports-team.dat

Code submission

Congratulations 🙌! It's time to submit your code and prepare for your on-site presentation. Please email your Node.js project to nick@rivaltech.com.