Release v0.1.2
Today we bring in some really exciting updates to Karmaloop AI Open Source Chat Bot Framework by super charging the Karmaloop AIML Bot Server! I am calling this the “makes sense” release. Because literally this is what will get a beginner chat bot developer and an experienced chat bot builder excited alike, because of how easy we have made it to build a chat bot from scratch. Actually we have made it easier to wrap your head around how this works by making several otherwise DIY steps baked into the aiml bot server itself.
Alright, let’s get down to business and understand what has been added:
- Built-in API server – Now you do not need to build an API endpoint from scratch that communicates with the Karmaloop AIML Bot Server over TCP/IP. It comes built in. You can also use the in-built API server endpoint as a reference point for building something more complex and suited to your production environment.
- Built-in Chat Bot client – What this means is you can actually start using the Chat Bot as soon as your server starts! This is mighty attractive to developers who are just starting out with chat bot development, because they can feel out the bot with practically zero code. Though not recommended, but you can even embed this in-built chat UI right into your websites. We would rather recommend you to treat the chat UI code as a boilerplate application to build something more unique to the look and feel of your website, mobile app etc, but it absolutely wouldn’t hurt using it in production environment (keep the disclaimer in mind 😉
- NuGet Support – In the .NET world developers use nuget. It is similar to what npm, bower etc. mean to the Javascript world. The solution now uses nuget to restore dependency packages, and the build script does that for you before it starts a build. The nuget.exe binary is now part of the solution and Linux and macOS use the very same binary to do a nuget restore.
- Status Reporting – Now when you start the server, it prints the port numbers/URLs for the TCP/IP and API endpoint communication. It also prints the default URL for accessing the chat UI.
I hope that these changes will make your life easier starting out with Karmaloop AI Open Source Chat Bot Framework and build cool bots that will power your bots on websites and mobile apps.
Pssst. What’s next?
- Immediate priority – Fixup of the Skills framework. Currently you have to add skills by coding in C# and building the entire solution all over again. I am not a fan of this approach. This will change for the better very soon.
- Ability to publish your bots to Slack, Skype and Facebook. Yes, now we are talking business eh?!