How to integrate a database to api.ai chat-bot using a webhook

Question

I'm developing a chat-bot using api.ai for NLP and i'm stucked where i need to query some data from a database. And also i need to do some processing of those data. I'm not much clear how can I do this using the webhook. Any thoughts and tips would be really appreciated.

Answer 1

You might want to check out API.AI's getting started guide, the last part of which involves the basics of adding fulfillment to your agent which pulls from this getting started sample

We use Cloud Functions for Firebase in the sample but you can't call non-Google APIs or URLs without setting up billing. You can also use any other hosting providers (Google's AppEngine, Compute Engine, Amazon's Lambda, EC2, Heroku, Azure, etc.) for fulfilling API.AI agents, as long as you have a server that can respond to a HTTPS request, it'll work with API.AI's webhook fulfillment. To get started you can even use your local machine and tools like ngrok to tunnel the connection from a HTTPS URL to your local development machine: https://ngrok.com/ . If your just starting out I'd recommend doing whatever your most comfortable with.

Answer 2

Am currently using Node-RED to process the data received through the webhook. The webhook receives the data in JSON and if you've setup your intents and entities correctly, you'll get data that you can act on.

This can be achieved as a stand-alone nodeJS app that you host somewhere, like Heroku or OpenShift. But important point is that you need a server running a program somewhere to process the data that api.ai sends.

Am using firebase as my database and is integrated into my Node-RED setup and now I can do sophisticated queries like “how much did I walk last Wednesday”