MROBot

A fully serverless (AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB) Slack bot with GPT-4 support and full conversation mode.

Features & Usage

• Support a one-off response from MROBot when mentioning the bot (@MROBot) in a channel you are both a member of. (Make sure the Bot is added to whichever channel in which you want to talk to the Bot).
• Support full conversation with context carried over. To start a full conversation, run the command: /MROBot start. To end the conversation, run the command: /mrobot stop.
• Support latest GPT-4 model. If you want to start a conversation with the new GPT-4 model, run the command /mrobot start gpt-4. In this mode, responses take a longer time. By default, the model used is gpt-4.
• Support collaboration mode. eg: add the Bot to a channel, start a conversation with it (/mrobot start): every channel members can reply to the Bot to help refine the answers it provides.

Installation and deployment to your AWS environment

1. npm install
2. npm install -g serverless
3. Ensure the environment variables set in .env file. The token is then listed under OAuth & Permissions -> Bot User OAuth Token).
4. Deploy the stack: npm run deploy. For this command to be successful, you need to have your AWS environment variables properly set (Access Key Id and Security Token).

Setting up Slack

1. If you haven't already, create a new bot using this link: https://api.slack.com/apps/new
2. Our bot replies to a slash command. On the left Menu, click Slash Commands -> Create new Command and set:
   • Command: /mrobot
   • Request URL: [Url of API Gateway provided by npm run deploy]
   • Short Description: Start or stop a full conversation with MROBot
   • Usage Hint: start|stop [engine]
3. Our bot subscribes to Events. On the left Menu, click Event Subscriptions. Under Request URL, add again the link to API Gateway created by npm run deploy. Then make sure to select these events under Subscribe to Bot Events:
   • app_mention
   • message.channels
   • message.groups
   • message.im
4. Our bot requires permissions. On the left Menu, click OAuth & Permissions -> Scopes. Make sure all these scopes are added:
   • app_mentions:read
   • channels:history
   • chat:write
   • commands
   • groups:history
   • im:history
5. Our bot can talk to people via DM. On the left Menu, click App Home -> Show Tabs. Make sure Messages Tab is ticked and also Allow users to send Slash commands and messages from the messages tab.

What is being installed in my AWS account?

Here are the main resources this Bot deploys:

• 1 API Gateway instance
• 2 AWS Lambda functions
• 1 DynamoDB table
• 1 S3 deployment bucket (used by serverless)

To be able to subscribe to Slack events, we need an API endpoint, so we create an API Gateway instance.

Events that are sent via Slack need acknowledgement within 3 seconds, otherwise they are retried. To go around this we are provisioning the lambda function. But calling OpenAI is taking often longer than 3 seconds. So we create two functions:

• 1 acknowledger: this function acknowledges the event as fast as it possibly can. It then invokes asynchronously the bot function.
• 1 bot function: this function calls OpenAI and sends the OpenAI response back to Slack.

The Bot supports full conversation mode, ie it keeps the context of what was previously exchanged to provide a new answer. To do that /mrobot start creates a record in DynamoDB for the conversation. When /mrobot stop is called, the conversation is deleted.

Deprovision

Should you want to remove all the resources created on AWS and deprovision the bot, you could just type: npm run deprovision