Clockify NLP Bot

Clockify NLP Bot is a Bot Framework bot developed to act as a timesheet assistant for the busy and the lazy among us. It reminds proactively people to fill in their time when EOD approaches, and it accepts natural language for creating time entries directly from chat.

It's easy!

How to use it

It's simple, just open a chat with the bot either on Teams or Telegram.

👉 Chat on Telegram
👉 Chat on Teams

Features:

Proactive reminders It will assist you to complete your due diligence. If you have less than 6 hours reported on your Clockify (no matter how you put them in) it sends you a reminder.

Adding time entries with ease Add your time flexibly, even indicating projects partially. For example, you can type time bot instead of time_survey_bot. If it's not ambiguous, it'll figure it out.

Smart task request Some projects benefit from tasks drill down, some don't. If you never use them on the project, it doesn't ask it in the first place.

Architecture

This bot is hosted by xtream on Azure Cloud. This is what it looks like:

Support

This project was started as an internal tool for our employees, and then we decided to roll it out to anyone who could benefit from it, with a few tweaks and adjustments. Hence, we'd do our best to work on any issue or bug but do consider we're maintaining it on our spare time.

If you'd like to see this project grow in features, richness and support, you can give a ⭐️ to let us know this is helpful. You can also buy us a coffee if you like.

Installing

If you want to host the bot yourself, you'll need to provide for the other components of the architecture on your own.
The following are minimal instructions for installing and deploying the bot on App Service.

Prerequisites

• .NET Core SDK version 3.1

# determine dotnet version
dotnet --version

To run this bot

Make sure to provide required configuration values. The app currently needs a value for these properties:

{
  "LuisAppId": "",
  "LuisAPIKey": "",
  "LuisAPIHostName": "",
  "ProactiveBotApiKey": "",
  "KeyVaultName": "",
  "MicrosoftAppId": "",
  "MicrosoftAppPassword": ""
}

Then run the bot. For example, from a terminal:

# run the bot
dotnet run

Integration testing setup

• Create a Clockify account and generate an API key
• Create a test.runsettings file with the following env variables

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<RunSettings>
    <RunConfiguration>
        <EnvironmentVariables>
            <CLOCKIFY_API_KEY><!--API-KEY--></CLOCKIFY_API_KEY>
            <CLOCKIFY_WS_ID><!--ACTIVE-WORKSPACE-ID--></CLOCKIFY_WS_ID>
        </EnvironmentVariables>
    </RunConfiguration>
</RunSettings>

• Configure the Test Runner to use the custom settings

Testing the bot using Bot Framework Emulator

Bot Framework Emulator is a desktop application that allows bot developers to test and debug their bots on localhost or running remotely through a tunnel.

• Install the Bot Framework Emulator version 4.9.0 or greater from here

Connect to the bot using Bot Framework Emulator

• Launch Bot Framework Emulator
• File -> Open Bot
• Enter a Bot URL of http://localhost:3978/api/messages

Deploy the bot to Azure

To learn more about deploying a bot to Azure, see Deploy your bot to Azure for a complete list of deployment instructions.

Further reading

• Bot Framework Documentation
• Azure Bot Service Introduction
• Language Understanding using LUIS

Who we are

A proudly 🇮🇹 software development and data science startup.
We consider ourselves a family of talented and passionate people building their own products and powerful solutions for our clients. Get to know us more on xtreamers.io or follow us on LinkedIn.