How to Write a Twitter Bot in 5 Minutes

Meet @DearAssistant,
a Twitter bot that is like a mini version of Siri. You can tweet your
questions in plan English and the bot will reply with an answer.

The Twitter bot is internally using Wolfram Alpha so there’s a whole range of questions that it can answer. Here are some questions that people have asked @DearAssistant so far:

• How many calories are in Diet Coke? (link)
• When was Mahatama Gandhi born? (link)
• What is the distance between city A and city B (link)
• Who directed the film M (link)
• What is the price of Kindle Paperwhite.

You can also ask the bot for word meanings, weather conditions, language
translation, to convert between time zones, date calculations (how many
days until Christmas) and more.

Writing a Twitter Bot – The Basic Ingredients

Writing
a Twitter bot is surprisingly simple and you can get one up and running
in 5 minutes. It helps if you know little bit of coding (simple
JavaScript) but that’s certainly not a requirement for writing a basic
Twitter bot.

A bot is essentially a program that is always running
in the background and whenever it encounters a command (tweets in
this), it processes it (based on the text of the tweeet) and sends a
reply to the tweeter in another tweet.

Earlier, you would need a
web server to run the bot while the bot itself would be written in
languages like PHP, Perl or Python. That’s complicated so we will use
Google Scripts to write the Twitter bot and host it on our Google Drive.

How to Write a Twitter Bot – Step by Step

Step A: Setup a Twitter App

1. Create a new account at Twitter that will become the bot. Then go to dev.twitter.com,
   sign-in with your new Twitter account and create a Twitter app. Give
   your app a name, description, website (any URL) and callback URL
   (https://spreadsheets.google.com/macros/). Agree to the terms, fill in
   the CAPTCHA and submit the form to create your first Twitter
   application.
2. Once the Twitter app has been created, click the
   Settings tab and choose Read and Write under Application Type. This is
   important since we want the bot to read tweets as well as post tweets.
   Click the Update button to save your changes.
3. Switch to the
   OAuth tool tab and make note of the Consumer Key and Consumer Secret. We
   will need these later in our Google Apps Script.

Step B: Create a Wolfram Alpha App

1. While
   the Twitter app will monitor and respond to tweets, the Wolfram App
   will be used to determine answers that users will be posing to your
   Twitter bot.
2. Go to developer.wolfram.com, create an account and then choose “Get an App ID” to create your new app.
3. We
   will need this App ID in the Google Script. Remember that your free
   Wolfram Alpha App can only be used for a non-commercial purpose.

Step C: Host the Twitter bot on Google Drive

1. While you are signed-in to your Gmail account, go to script.google.com and then choose File -> Make a copy to duplicate the Twitter bot into your Google Drive.
2. Edit
   the values of TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY, TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET,
   TWITTER_HANDLE (your new Twitter account) and WOLFRAM_API_ID – you know
   them all from the previous steps.
3. Go to Run -> Start to
   initialize the Twitter bot. Say yes if the script requires you to
   authorize access to certain Google Script services.
4. Go to Run
   -> Start to actually run the Twitter bot. It will show an
   “Authorization Required” dialog and will redirect you to Twitter where
   you can grant the script access to your Twitter account.

That’s
it. Close Google Scripts and your Twitter bot is now up and running,
ready to take commands. As always, you are free to use, modify and
distribute the source code with attribution.
Sources : WikiBoogle