The API.AI bot, Kylie, built for the 2017 GovHack competition.

Meet Kylie. Kylie is the friendly front door to government data, delivering a wide range of information in an easy to use messaging interface. APA.AI is a conversation platform that’s able to deploy to many messaging platforms with the click of a button. Instead of government departments each maintaining their own collection of different messaging bots, they can all be serviced by Kylie.

We have relied on services provided by Google throughout this project. We have used API.AI to provide responses using the Google Assistant. This is deployed via Actions on Google. We have deployed our Google Assistant bot on Facebook, Twitter, Slack, and on the web. We have also tested our bot on the Google Home device. Our webhook is hosted on Google Cloud Storage. Our database is on Cloud SQL. Our Kylie server is hosted on a VM instance running on the Google Compute Engine. It's running Debian 8 "Jessie." The Cloud Storage, SQL, and Compute Engine are all available via the Google Cloud Platform, and API.AI and Actions on Google can be linked to the Cloud platform.

api_ai_agent/

Folder contains the intents and entities used in our agent. These files can be placed in a Zip and Restored or Imported into API.AI. The files agent.json, customDomainsResponses.json and folders entities, intents should be at the top level of the Zip.

kylie_server/kylie.py

Simple server to handle GET requests. It will query a database, and respond with JSON output.

• Requires configuration of database host, database name, and the username and password to connect to it.

kylie_server/kylie.service

systemd unit file for running the Kylie server as a service.

• More information: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/systemd

kylie_server/KylieDatabaseGovHack2017.sql

Dump of the database queried by the Kylie server.

api_ai_webhook/index.js

Webhook for connecting to the hosted Kylie server (kylie.py). Will send a GET request to the API provided by the server. This needs to be added as "Fulfillment" on API.AI.

• Requires configuration of the host and port variables, from which the Kylie server is available.
• More information: https://api.ai/docs/getting-started/basic-fulfillment-conversation

Webhook

Command to deploy the webhook to Google Storage. This relies on the Google Cloud SDK.

gcloud beta functions deploy govhackWebhook --stage-bucket govhack2017 --trigger-http

Note: deploy govhackWebhook is a reference to exports.govhackWebhook in index.js.