Challenges and Solutions - Viber Bot with AWS

Viber has made it open to develop the basic conversational bots. The platform is in very basic state and better for the guided conversation as of now. e.g. you can show the URL buttons, keyboard buttons etc. for the user selection and then have a business logic on the server side.
It is more of a microservice kind of framework, rather than a real AI with intents, contexts as API.AI, wit.ai, pandora or some others.

But it is worth a try, and we have done it to test some basic scenarios for Telco.

Few challenges and solutions 

1. Direct integration of Viber bot using Node is also feasible, but we used Claudia js for the easy deployment on AWS.

• During deployment, make sure the region selected is same as in your AWS set up, else the claudia js deployment will show you the successful webhooks in claudia CLI but you will see no changes in AWS console.
• Once the webhook is there, you can configure it.
• Useful links for claudia are below.
• https://www.claudiajs.com/tutorials/viber-chatbot.html
• https://github.com/claudiajs/claudia-bot-builder/blob/1d94d78f30155ba5ad03d0c3033f573531c7fb83/docs/VIBER_CUSTOM_MESSAGES.md#sending-multiple-messages

2. Once you follow the viber steps to make a public account and get the API key, do not forget to restart viber and also the phone, in case you do not see the "create public account" button on Viber.

3. Better option to engage your customers directly is the deeplink to your bot. 

• You can refer for the Viber deeplinks here https://developers.viber.com/tools/deep-links/index.html#deep-links
• In the deeplink you will need to know URI of your public account. To do that, you can call viber API for getAccountInfo using POSTMAN or any other plugin.
• I used POSTMAN, and screenshot for your understanding, about how to call, is below (use your own Viber key ) and get the URI from the response.