18/02/2021 The Electron App is alive!

Last week was spent more on refining our scripts as well as getting everything together to a point where we will be able to build an electron app that we can give to our client.

Goals

<aside> 🎯 **What are we looking to achieve?

JS Scripts and Extending API** This week we added some of the final touches to our scripts, adding robust error handling as well as adding extra functionality to the API in terms of the unlinkedBots call.

2. Upgrade UI The UI got a facelift where more intuitive colours and styles were used to increase the usability of the system as a whole.

3. Bringing Everything Together into an Electron App Integrating the ****Twilio JS scripts to be usable in the electron environment has yielded some issues but this week we were able to clean them up.

</aside>

JS Scripts and Extending API

This was mainly adding the final finishing touches as well as adding robust error handling to each and every API call.

The scripts at a point where we are considering taking them and converting them into NPM packages. This would include defining our very own universal bot format to allow for easy extraction of key information from a Voiceflow diagram as well as the ability to deploy to Twilio from this format.

This means that in the future of SMS-IT, we will be able to support multiple different platforms where we convert their conversation diagrams into this universal bot format and be able to upload a chatbot to Twilio with just a simple package.

New API Call

The API has some incredible calls to allow you to connect to Twilio, create and remove a chatbot, receive all deployed bots, simulate a conversation as well as to update phone number SMS webhooks.

However, we thought what if we wanted to upload a bot and not link it to a phone number (i.e to be deployed at a later date.) This brought about the idea of adding the brand new getUnlinkedBots API call.

/**
   * Fetches a list of all bots that are currently sitting on
   * Twilio servers but are not linked to a phone number.
   *
   */
  async getUnlinkedBots(client){
    return (await unlinked.getUnlinkedBots(client))
  }

This call will now let you return all bots that are not linked to a phone allowing us to extend our functionality to the point where we can allow a clinician to upload as many bots at any time and test them when they want to.

Upgrading the UI

The user interface has seen a massive facelift in terms of styling and usability. As this is a system build for clinicians, it's extremely important that the application is super easy to navigate and that you are able to deploy a chatbot and as little clicks as possible.