Bubble Chatbot: Possible to extract data from text?

Questions
1

I’m testing a conversational interface, and I’ve played with a lot of the chat builders that connect to Facebook Messenger, Slack, etc. I’m wondering what’s possible in Bubble. One question: is there any way to watch for keywords in a text string and extract data?

For example, could a user type

I have a meeting on Friday at 12pm

And Bubble would pull the day and time out. I"m not even getting into running a workflow to convert that text to data at this point, just want to know if that first step is possible.

I saw there was something with @ mentions on this thread, but not sure how to do it or relate it to this context.

2

Yes, it’s possible. You’ll just have to build out a text parser, presumably using tons of regular expressions.

3

Can the text parser be built in Bubble or needs to be external?

4

It can be built in Bubble. Though if your requirements are quite complex, I would look into interfacing with an external solution.

5

Great. Any tutorial or place I should look for a starting point.

To simplify, let’s say I want to set a flag for “Today” that is True/false.

For example, the user types:

Pick up laundry today

What would I do in Bubble to look for “Today” in text and set the True/False flag to “Today: True”?

Is this a regex thing?

6

Regex would work. You can play around with your regex here until it pulls out your desired keywords:
http://www.regexpal.com/

Just store the regex into a database if you want to dynamically modify it (add keywords, etc.).

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7

Hi,

You can use Botanalytics for this data analysis. You can see the most common phrases and keywords on your dashboard. It’s free. Try to integrate into your bot. Let me know if you have any questions at kubra@botanalytics.co

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8

Have you tried https://api.ai

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9

I’ve tried it for building a chatbot on their platform, but not connecting it to Bubble, that seems like some technical expertise (coding) would be required.