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Getting Started with Botpress

Getting started with Botpress to build your first chatbot is easier than you think. Botpress removes the complexity of building a conversational experience that customers will love.

Botpress Community

19 Aug, 2021

Updated 27 May, 2022

Developing your own chatbot can be an extremely expensive and time-consuming task without the proper tools and knowledge to support the endeavour. That’s why having a platform that abstracts away some of the complexities of developing a chatbot from scratch can come in handy for your organization.

In this blog post, we’re going to discuss what Botpress is and how it enables developers to make a chatbot in a fraction of the time they would when building from scratch.

What is Botpress

At its core, Botpress is a tool to simplify the process of building chatbots for developers. The platform puts together the boilerplate code and infrastructure you need to get a chatbot up and running and gives a complete dev-friendly platform that ships with all the tools you need to build, deploy and manage production-grade chatbots in record time. The platform includes:

Built-in Natural Language Processing tasks such as intent recognition, spell checking, entity extraction, and slot tagging (and many others)
A visual conversation studio to design multi-turn conversations and workflows
An emulator & a debugger to simulate conversations and debug your chatbot
Support for popular messaging channels like Slack, Telegram, MS Teams, Facebook Messenger, and an embeddable web chat
An SDK and code editor to extend the capabilities
Post-deployment tools like chatbot analytics dashboards, human handoff and more…

Botpress vs. Competition

Botpress has many advantages over other platforms and frameworks:

It is cloud-agnostic; therefore, you can run it on the cloud platform or the on-premise infrastructure of your choice, giving you full control over your data privacy.
The core of Botpress is an open-source chatbot software with thousands of GitHub contributors and stargazers and a thriving community forum.
The platform offers a solid developer experience by being remarkably flexible, easy to use, and fast. We offer support for multiple languages, including French, Arabic, Spanish, and over 100 more languages.
No vendor lock-in

Most importantly, our platform has proven to deliver a better conversational experience to end-users

Getting Started with Botpress

Getting started with Botpress is easy. We build and distribute binaries of the latest stable version to our Github repositories.

Download

First things first, download the latest stable binaries which are available here or click below. Alternatively, you may find all the versions and nightly builds in our public S3 Bucket.

Docker

Installation

To install Botpress, you will need to unzip the file you download somewhere on your computer. Make sure that your computer has at least:

Memory (RAM): Recommended 4 GB or above.
Hard Drive: Recommended 64 GB of free space or above.
A 64 bits architecture
The right to read/write to the Botpress directory and subdirectories.

Starting Botpress

Executable

To start Botpress, you will want to double-click on the bp.exe file in the directory you extracted Botpress.

Alternatively, you can also start it from the terminal using the command:

The first time you run Botpress, the built-in modules take some time to install. Once you’ve done that, subsequent runs will be much faster.

Once the modules are installed and loaded, you should end up with something similar to the console log below:

Commands

You can also start Botpress Server using the Command Line Interface (CLI). To see all the commands available, run < ./bp --help. >

Creating a bot

Now that you’ve got Botpress installed, it’s time to learn how to create a bot. We’ve developed a short tutorial video to help you get started down below:

Conclusion

In this post, we’ve walked through how to set up Botpress as well as from there, how to create our first bot. Hopefully, this tutorial will allow you to kickstart your journey in developing cloud-agnostic, highly intelligent, bots with NLU capability. From here, you should be ready to learn how to leverage containerization to deploy your Botpress server which we will cover in our next post!