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Comment by malanj | Hacker News Reader

Really cool work - nice going! Great application of Deep Leaning.

I'm really curious about the Whatsapp and Facebook messenger integration, given that they don't seem to have published APIs. How did you do it?

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From what I understand, it's not that they are integrated. Those apps allow to send and receive SMS. In doing so, they can simply send the queries via SMS on those apps, allowing to receive the result there.

Edit: I was wrong!

To clarify - the system is in fact natively integrated across the SMS, Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger protocols. :) It's not using SMS as a way to talk to them.

If you use those, you'll see that the responses are almost instantaneous, compared to the lag which SMS inherently has. There is a general purpose API that can be used via any platform - Slack, Telegram, Gtalk, or email. Anything that supports text.

Thanks for clarification. I have used Whatsapp and it worked great until 08:30 PT when it suddenly stopped working.

When you say "natively integrated" what do you mean? As far as I can tell there are no APIs for either Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger.

Ah, it's possible that there's some issue with the WA integration. I'll check. In the mean time, SMS and FB Messenger should be active for sure!

I'm using thirdparty open source libraries to integrate FB and Whatsapp into this.

It appears that Whatsapp may have (temporarily?) blocked access to their service.

User interactions have really spiked as we speak. Try shifting to FB Messenger (if abroad or not wanting to use SMS) or SMS in the meanwhile!

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