Kogno

Kogno is an open source framework running on the Ruby programming language for developing conversational applications.

It is based on the MVC architecture and strongly inspired by Rails, so if you have ever worked on this framework, Kogno will be very familiar to you.

The following messaging platforms are currently supported: WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram, maintaining a unified code in a single application for all of them.

Full Documentation

You can read the full documentation at https://docs.kogno.io or just continue here.

Getting Started

1. Install Kogno gem:

$ gem install kogno

2. At the command prompt, create a new Kogno application:

$ kogno new my_chatbot

3. Change directory to my_chatbot and install the dependencies:

The MySQL development libraries must be previously installed before running the following command.

$ bundle install

4. Configure the database at config/database.yml:

adapter: mysql2
pool: 5
username: your_user_name
password: your_password
host:  localhost
database: your_database_name
encoding: utf8mb4
collation: utf8mb4_unicode_ci

5. Create framework's tables in database:

$ kogno install

6. Start your web server to receive incoming updates via an outgoing webhook from the messaging platforms:

$ kogno http start

In order to receive webhooks you must configure the messaging platforms:

• Configure WhatsApp
• Configure Telegram
• Configure Messenger

How an app written in Kogno looks like?

The code below represents a Context class, which is the equivalent of a Controller class in Ruby on Rails:

class MainContext < Conversation

  def blocks

    intent "greeting" do
    
      @reply.text "Hello!"
      @reply.button(
        "How can I help you today?",
        [
          {
            title: "View Products",
            payload: "featured_products"
          },
          { 
            title: "My Cart",
            payload: "purchases/view_cart"
          }
        ]
      )
      
    end
    
    postback "featured_products" do
    
      @reply.text "Alright."
      @reply.template "products/featured", title: "Here is a list of today's featured products."
      
    end
    
    keyword ["stop", "quit"] do
    
      @reply.text "Alright"
      @reply.typing 2.seconds
      @reply.text "I'll stop writing you now.."
      
    end
    
    everything_else do 
    
      @reply.text "Sorry, but I don't understand what you said."
      
    end

  end

end

In the example above, MainContext has the ability to handle the following scenarios:

• intent "greeting": A greeting message such as "Hello" or "Hi". Which was previously created and trained on the NLP engine.
• postback"featured_products": Click event on the button "View Products" that have been sent as reply in the previous block intent "greeting".
• keyword ["stop", "quit"]: Specifically two keywords "stop" or "quit".
• everything_else: Any message whose characteristics didn't match the execution criteria of the blocks listed above.

To better understand how blocks work and to see the full list of them, check the following link https://docs.kogno.io/contexts/blocks.

Contribute

You can contribute a lot to this project by developing conversational applications with Kogno and in case you find a bug, please report it.

And if you're as passionate about it as we are, come and code with us by fixing bugs, adding more integrations and creating more features.

License

Kogno is released under the MIT License.

Learn More

Read the full the documentation at http://docs.kogno.io.

Also you can download the source code of the flight reservation demo app written in Kogno.