How to make a chatbot only for searching the excel

Question

I want to make the simplest chatbot for searching the information much easier.

For example, if I ask John's major, my chatbot will answer that it is Computer science. So simple.

But I found that if I want to make a chatbot which is answering based on database should through webhook thing, and It doesn't sound easy for me. Is there any other (easy) way to make chatbot based on excel data or send a query... or whatever databases..

I want to make this on dialogflow!

+If i use chatscript, webhook is not necessary?

Answer 1

You need a webhook to connect to your application which can do what you need. You have 2 options in DialogFlow:

• Webhook URL: to invoke your custom application (here you have all the flexibility you need: access Excel, compute a response, etc..)
• Inline Editor: create a Cloud Function on Google Firebase (I have no experience but I expect you can do almost anything you need - check pricing as it is a cloud service)

Setup #1 is not difficult, the harder part is to manage/access the XLS file programmatically.

Best of luck, Beppe