How many times have you gotten home from work, tired and hungry, just to look in your refrigerator and find random food items staring back at you? Or maybe you’re tired of heating up the same easy mac. You want to spice it up, but don’t really know how. How about asking for some help from a chatbot?
We’ve been playing around with the recent release of our Webhooks product, which has made it easy to connect chatbots to third party resources in order to create dynamic, engaging conversations with your users, and push out useful data. One of our Product Managers, Aaron Lupo, has built bots that demonstrate how Instabot builders can use any API to enhance conversations.
In the example below, we have a conversational bot that simply connects with the free recipe API over at Food2Fork. How does it work, you ask?
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The bot takes the user’s ingredients in as free text
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Sends these items to the Food2Fork API
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Returns popular recipes from the Food2Fork API. These recipes contain other data like an image or source URL that can also be included in your Instabot.
We made it a little more interesting by adding it to a demo NY Times food site to demonstrate how a bot can improve the content already on your site.
Besides quickly bringing delicious recipes for your users, In addition to making everyone hungry for delicious recipes, webhooks can be used to solve other content requirements. We have seen integrations with Bing’s Websearch, current Cryptocurrency pricing, and even language translation APIs!
The uses for webhooks are endless and we would love to hear what you would want to do with them. Try out our recipe bot for yourself and get cooking tonight! :)
What other cool projects would you use webhooks API integrations for? Let us know in the comment section, and as always, feel free to send us feedback at [email protected].