Development of a Facebook Messenger chatbot application for social media event discovery

Abstract

This thesis documents the development of a chatbot application integrated into the Face-book Messenger platform. The development process was undertaken in affiliation with I Dance Helsinki, a community organiser for Afro-Latin dance events and teaching in Helsinki, in support for an overlapping website-based solution for event organisation and community news. To support I Dance Helsinki’s goal of improving the spread of news and notifications of new events in the Afro-Latin dance scene in Helsinki, a chatbot application was presented as solution which leverages the existing social community and connections on Facebook.

This thesis introduces the concept of chatbots, their characteristics as a communication channel and how they differ from other methods of connecting to end-users. As a part of this project, the technological landscape was evaluated, with a focus on the tools available for integration to Facebook and Amazon Web Services for serverless cloud hosting.

This project resulted in the implementation of a chatbot application hosted on the AWS cloud with integrations to Facebook Messenger via the Facebook Graph API and the Facebook Messenger Platform API. The chatbot allows users to query for upcoming events posted to Facebook using natural language, scoped to English within this project.