
Show HN: Using Google Sheets to create a survey chat bot without a server - m88m
https://github.com/Viber/build-a-bot-with-zero-coding
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justboxing
This is beautiful.

Also - side-note but often overlooked on open-source & github projects - the
documentation / getting started guide on home page is EXCELLENT!

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m88m
Thanks. <3 GitHub!

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bhnmmhmd
This is great! I wonder can it be done for Telegram as well?

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gfredtech
When I'm free this evening, I'll follow the guide and build a telegram bot. I
will fork his repo if it works

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bhnmmhmd
Thanks. Waiting to hear more from you.

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DanI-S
If you're interested in this approach, there's a similar spreadsheet-based
pattern available for building trivia-style games for the Google Assistant
platform:

[https://triviatemplate.com/](https://triviatemplate.com/)

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dvfjsdhgfv
Seeing these chatbots I'm always wondering... Are customers rally using these?
I'm wondering because it would never occur to me to chat to a chatbot.

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gfredtech
In Russia, lots of people use telegram and the bots too. I use bots to do lots
of things, from ordering pizza to managing my schedule. However, these bots
are usually not NLP-powered...so there's less disaster as compared to how
facebook bots rely heavily on natural language input from the user

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frandroid
Yeah, these are more chat wizards than chatbots... I think we should
distinguish that.

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highd
So terminal UIs are coming back?

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charred_toast
How difficult, if at all possible, would it be to add images to each question?

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m88m
Hi. Should be easy! I have another demo that actually send images, rich
messages and other elements. However, I can't share its source code yet.
Sorry!

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wnevets
I did something similar with AWS's S3, Lamba and a google spreadsheet.

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jimktrains2
You have a hacienda server, you're just not managing it.

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jimktrains2
Wow, I have no idea where that came from. Hacienda should be backend.

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nikolay
They didn't approve my developer account, so, I have no incentive to look into
this when Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and many others are widely available.

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m88m
Hi Nikolay. Viber's DevRel here. Super sorry to hear that. Can you please shot
me an email over devsupport[at]viber[dot]com? I'll try to fix this.

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nikolay
Why do you need to manually approve at all? I have a bunch of public accounts
and I want to take full advantage of those.

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m88m
We are working on a new better system. Should be out anytime now.

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nikolay
A week late - no change!

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pmlnr
That is not without a server... it's not your server, but it does have a
server side.

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Isamu
In fairness, "serverless" architecture involves servers.

I am appalled by the constant erosion of meaning in the tech field, but there
you are.

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goblin89
How do we refer to the type of architecture without server-side component
proper[0][1][2] though? Makes it surprisingly hard to find material and
research on those topics.

Recently I was looking for one insightful talk (with a PoC) where websites run
completely on users’ machines. It’s been a couple of years since I saw that
talk for the first time, “cloud” was the term of choice to refer to what’s
“serverless” now. I had to give up after pages upon pages of search results
talking about Lambda or Azure (otherwise I’d have linked the talk here, of
course).

[0]
[https://github.com/jhiesey/peercloud](https://github.com/jhiesey/peercloud)
[1]
[https://github.com/lucaspiller/shortly](https://github.com/lucaspiller/shortly)
[2] [https://paul.kinlan.me/serverless-sync-in-web-
apps/](https://paul.kinlan.me/serverless-sync-in-web-apps/)

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le-mark
It's curious to see these occasional "cool little apps using google sheets for
a datastore" when there are _many_ "database as a service" around with free
tiers, like firebase, restdb, and a whole bunch of others. Why not just use a
real database instead of hacking google sheets?

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austenallred
Because it's cool that you can

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m88m
Totally agree. Personally, I just adored everything about GSuite interface.
They did an amazing work.

