I'm trying to send a notification out using Google Chats. But I have a few problems with the documentation I've been able to find:
It requires me to have a paid service account, which I do not have, and will not be getting
It requires using a chat bot, which (in my understanding) needs to be added to a room, and cannot just send out messages
Chat bots can't send out messages directly to personal accounts?
I'm already using Google OAuth2 authentication to access another Google API, so I'd like to use a Google API to send messages directly from the authenticated account. How would I do that?
So far:
All the documentation I can find is about making a chat bot.
I've considered some alternatives to sending out messages, but due to corporate device restrictions that will not be changing, google chats is my best option.
At the moment what you're trying to do is not possible, for multiple reasons.
You may know this already, but Google Chat is an upgrade to their old "Classic Hangouts" chat. In Google's own words, this is focused on enterprise (i.e. paid) accounts. While personal accounts are also able to upgrade and get some of the benefits, their documentation shows that Google Chat for personal accounts is very similar to the old Hangouts and most of the new features are meant for the paid accounts. This also includes the use of bots.
As you've observed, the Chat API currently only has methods to create and manage bots. There are no methods to send messages as your own account. This could be to prevent spam or because their Chat API is relatively new, since the Classic Hangouts did not have an API, and Chat hasn't fully replaced it yet. Even then, given that Chat is "enterprise-focused", it is uncertain whether or not personal accounts would get access to any new API features.
You could try to post feedback on their issue tracker or request the feature to see if you get a response, but for an immediate solution you may want to just use the Gmail API to send a regular email or reconsider the other alternatives that you had in mind.
Related
Is there a way to send proactive cards from a bot to a Teams channel? The use case is a channel for service tickets. Once they get posted, a user will be able to interact with them with a few actions.
I’m looking at the documentation here for sending proactive messages. At the bottom, there’s a section for ”Creating channel conversations”, with a small reference to the startReplyChain(). However, the actual code and sample on GitHub still seem to reference a conversation with a member rather than sending something proactive to a channel.
There does appear to be documentation for incoming and outgoing webhooks, which is what I may end up doing. My only real concern is that it requires using Actionable Cards, which it references as legacy everywhere. This is despite saying that you can’t send Adaptive Cards with them. Perhaps they intend to enable these connectors to send Adaptive Cards, it’s not just very clear to me if this is a long-term solution I should be focusing on.
This is definitely possible, and it's important to note that you can even send from another process/application (e.g. on a schedule from an AWS Lamba). You can see a sample here for this.
The process of sending the message is just part of the story though - you need to have certain information already saved (e.g. in your database) to know how to contact the right user, group chat, or channel conversation, but there are a few ways to get that information. The most common is, when you bot is added to the conversation, to get it from the conversationUpdate event. You'll need conversation id, service url, tenant id, and your bot's App Id (what you get in the Azure portal for your bot, and which you're using already in your app's configuration, teams manifest, etc.). You can read more about the topic here and here.
Another option, if you don't have access to conversationUpdate (e.g. the user hasn't installed your app) is to call the Graph API to install your app. It's only possible to do this to a channel (on the v1 or beta api) (see here) or to a user (see here), but on the beta api only, and not (yet?) for a group chat.
I have to integrate 2 different azure bots into a single azure bot application. So thinking of integrating with the REST api. Will this approach work ?
From this links
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/rest-api/bot-framework-rest-connector-quickstart?view=azure-bot-service-4.0
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/rest-api/bot-framework-rest-connector-api-reference?view=azure-bot-service-4.0
I can get the access token from cloud bot. But there is no example on "sending message from client". It have examples on handling client messages from server as Activity object.
It would be better if any samples on "sending message from client to azure cloud throught REST"
what is different between REST and connectors.?
I believe it will be possible with DirectLine, but wanted to know how to do thorugh REST APIs.
Thanks in Advance !!
I can't tell you whether or not your idea will work for dealing with two separate bots without more information. If you are trying to start conversations with both bots and the sending messages to the different conversations based on some set of criteria than that should work.
The Bot Framework API can essentially split into two sections:
The Connector (primary) API that the bot uses to talk to users and the service.
The DirectLine API that you can use to talk to the bot instead of using one of the built-in connectors like Slack or Teams.
Based on your needs, the DirectLine is indeed what you are looking for. The directline.botframework.com/v3/directline/conversations/abc123/activities endpoint will allow a client app to send a message to the connected bot.
I have an external service with is own database where the users can log in.
Now I have a bot in NodeJS using Bot Builder and the Bot Framework.
I want to link them.
Is there anyway that the bot recognize the users from the other service everytime they open a new conversation and everytime they write something in the bot?
I've just tried with web chat before and I know that with channels that they support like Facebook, Telegram, Skype etc is easy to recognize the users every time they come back, but I don't know how if it is possible to do this with an external service where the users are already logged in and they want to talk with the chatbot.
I don't know how could I generate an authtoken or something that the bot framework read it and recognize the user.
You can use the DirectLine API to allow your bot and a custom client to communicate to each other, a sample can be found here, and here if you want to use WebSockets.
You can also add authentication to your bot via Azure Bot Service to use OAuth as stated here, where you will find samples too.
Using Instagram's API, is there any way to request a list or count of an application's registered users?
Instagram's real-time subscriptions can send notifications whenever a registered user posts to their feed, but I haven't found a way to get a list of those users, or even a count. This is easy enough to store server-side, but seems like something which should be discoverable.
Your Question
Using Instagram's API, is there any way to request a list of an application's registered users?
A quick search yielded no results for such a functionality. This make sense, though, since Instagram wouldn't want to open up all its users to any app designer.
Your App
If you want the number of users using your app, then you can easily track this yourself.
Instagram App
As mentioned before, Instagram probably won't provide even basic count information about its registered users. Presumably, this is valuable information.
Your Example
Instagram's real-time subscriptions can send notifications whenever a registered user posts to their feed...
This is true, but with very limited scope. The subscriptions below are based on users who are using your app or other simple criteria such as tags or geographic data.
Users: receive notifications when users who have registered with your application post new photos.
Tags: receive notifications when a new photo is tagged with tags of your choosing
Locations: receive notifications when new photos are posted and tagged with a specific location
Geographies: receive notifications when a new photos are posted in an arbitrary geographical location as defined by a center point
and radius
As far as I have found this far there is no IG API, however as already indicated you can keep track on your app. HOWEVER, what has not been pointed out is that you won't be made aware if users terminate their account or revoke your app so the count's might be a little off. (or worse if you didnt start keeping track since the public launch of your app)
You could test on a periodic basis if you still have access, but that would require additional code, and a lot of API calls if you app has a lot of users. I hope that IG will add this function at some point.
The facebook chat api is a power tool. From a purely technically point of view, it definitely does more than its predecessor of private messages in the Graph API.
This brings up a question of where Facebook is drawing the line of abuse of its chat api.
So here's how I'm planning to use the Facebook chat api for my app.
The app is an event planning app that lets users invite their friends to an event. Other than sending SMS, and emails to notify the guests, the most reliable way is to send invitations through the list of facebook friends. And let's face it, sometimes you may not have the person's phone number in your contact book, and you definitely don't remember most of their emails, so facebook is your only source for reaching them.
So I need a solution to send invitations to the guests. Here are my requirements and conditions:
The guest is a facebook friend of the user
There's no way of obtaining the guest's email (unless the user enters it) or phone number (ie. sms is not an option)
Each guest must receive a link that is unique to him/her
No one else should be able to obtain this link (ie. the message shouldn't be seen publicly)
It must not require the user's interaction to send these invitations (imagine having the user confirm a facebook post 10 times for the 10 facebook friends he's inviting). The invitation must be sent automatically.
Here's the obstacle. Facebook had revoked the functionality to send private message recently (I was able to have my facebook friends send me private messages via an app just over a month ago, not anymore). However, I discover that I could do so using Facebook Chat API.
This seems to be a grey area, my app is using the chat api for the sole purpose of helping the users notify their friends of their event invitation. There's no intention of abuse (such as mass messaging everyone of the user's friends with a link to my APP/website). Is Facebook going to hunt me down and revoke my App's privilege to use Facebook's API?
Can anyone shed some light on whether my intended usage of the API is an abuse or is it legitimate? If it is not legitimate, what are your suggestions.
I'd recommend using core functionality wherever possible here. For example, you could utilise the Facebook 'Event' object and the Graph API to create invite-only events and to invite individual friends of your app's users. This would deliver the same functionality without the need for nonce-based invite URLs and possible misuse of the Chat API. Take a look at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/event/#invited for details.