Building your own chatbot is a lot easier than you'd expect

The basic Dexter interface isn't dissimilar to Wordpress or any other blogging platform you might have tried. There's a large main composing window with some toolbars up top and off to the sides. To get started, you type in an example of what the user says to the bot -- to keep it simple, you can just start with "hello," or a variety of salutations (hello, hi, sup). Then, you just decide what the bot will say in response -- this case, I went with the Lionel Ritchie classic "is it me you're looking for?" There's a window on the right that you can test the code in and make sure you're getting the responses you wanted, and then it's just a matter of hitting publish.