Facebook chatbot appointment function (beta)

Facebook Chatbot - book an appointment

Imagine if we can book appointments with your dentist / doctor using a chatbot. Implementing a chatbot to interact with patients/clients, can help to improve customer experience with the business and reduce the amount of human interaction to book an appointments. Clinics and organizations would have more time to offer in person help to patients and customer and helps administrators to  manage their tasks more efficiently.

We have created a demo page with embedded facebook messenger chatbot using Amazon Lex and other AWS services.

Say "Hi" (AWS Lex utterance) to our bot here https://demo.classmethod.ca/fbchatcss.html

In this post, I will briefly go through the setup of the facebook messenger chatbot.

Architecture

Lambda function

Using the Amazon Lex blueprint, lex-make-appointment-python, we can schedule appointment to meet with Classmethod Canada staffs using Facebook Messenger. Our Facebook Messenger has implemented Lex chatbot that can provide general information about our company and our services using utterance that utilized natural language understanding (NLU) technology.

We use the blueprint to create an appointment and upload the appointment information to dynamoDB table with the addition of function updateDB().

<code>
ts = str(time.time())

def updateDB(appointment_time, date, appointment_type, userId):
    dynamodb = boto3.resource('dynamodb', region_name='us-east-1')
    dynamoTable = dynamodb.Table('<span style="color: #ff0000;">TABLENAME</span>')
    
    response = dynamoTable.put_item(   
        Item={ '<span style="color: #ff0000;">PARTITION_KEY</span>' : <span style="color: #ff0000;">appointment_type</span>, 
               '<span style="color: #ff0000;">UID</span>': <span style="color: #ff0000;">userId</span>, 
               '<span style="color: #ff0000;">AppointmentDate</span>': <span style="color: #ff0000;">date</span>, 
               '<span style="color: #ff0000;">AppointmentTime</span>': <span style="color: #ff0000;">appointment_time</span>, 
               '<span style="color: #ff0000;">AppointmentType</span>': <span style="color: #ff0000;">appointment_type</span>, 
               '<span style="color: #ff0000;">CreateTime</span>' : ts 
              } 
    ) 

    logger.debug('DBtestlog === Time {}, Date {}, Type {}' .format(appointment_time, date, appointment_type))
   </code>