The IWINewsBot has been developed by Tobias Kerst and Anna-Lena Schwarzkopf as a project at HS Karlsruhe. The bot informs about news posted to the black board of the IWI (Computer Science) faculty.
Users can subscribe to messages by starting a conversation with the bot (/start) or by pressing the Start-Button. They can then configure what messages they want to receive by the /settings command. The bot then sends them messages posted to the board, but only to those topics that the user subscribed to.
/mensa returns information about the daily mensa menu.
/profs provides a list of lecturers, which can be used to receive additional information about the, such as their location, their email-address or their consultation-hours.
/help gives detailed information about the bot's features.
The bot has some chatbot functionality that is enabled by rivescript. To check out, what's possible, use the /help command.
The bot is developed with the Scala programming language. The build tool is sbt. After cloning the project, one has to create a file called bot.token and place the token (generated by the BotFather) in it. The bot can then be compiled by running:
> sbt compile
In addition to running the bot with sbt run, sbt-assembly is used to generate a fat-jar. This can be achieved by running
> sbt assembly