Creating the Flask chatbot service

A webhook is an automated message, sent from apps. The Flask framework helps us to easily define webhooks.

Flask framework can be used to create a basic skeleton webhook as follows:

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)


@app.route('/bot’, methods=['POST'])
def bot():
    # add webhook logic here and return a response


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run()

The code above creates an application that defines the /bot endpoint which listens to POST requests.

Each incoming message from Twilio will invoke this endpoint.

Quick resources on Flask:

If you are not familiar with Flask, its documentation has a quick start section that should bring you up to speed quickly. If you want a more in-depth learning resource then I recommend you follow this tutorial: Flask Mega-Tutorial.

If you have successfully followed through, we are all set for building a chatbot!