BotMan Build A Chatbot video course
#chatbots #courseToday the Build A Chatbot video course by Marcel Pociot was released. I already watched all the episodes and can tell you a little bit more about it.
The course
The video course right now consists of 41 videos which are about 3,5 hours in length. Marcel explains everything you need to know to build a chatbot with his library called BotMan. And I can tell you, this is the best chatbot library for PHP out there.
He walks you through from listening to simple commands to more complex stuff like conversations and natural language processing or middlewares. You will also build a nice todo-bot on Telegram together. Every video is about three to ten minutes long which makes them easy to watch and follow. The regular price will be $249 but with the early access program you can get the course for just $139.
The playground
Besides the course Marcel also created a product called BotMan Playground. Now this is really interesting.
You can create an account there and start writing BotMan code inside your browser. No need to setup a local environment for testing out new stuff. It all works in the browser. You can also connect your code to a messenger like Facebook or Telegram. This makes it super useful to test out new stuff or to share code. The latter I will use a lot. Actually every video from the course has a dedicated code snippet in BotMan Playground where you can test it out yourself.
Best thing about it: BotMan Playground is included in the video course. So you get both products together.
The creator(s)
I guess most people know Marcel Pociot already. He has been an active PHP / Laravel community member now for years and has built multiple packages or contributed to projects. The last years he was working on BotMan besides his full-time job. BotMan gave him the chance to quit this job and start a company with his friend Sebastian Schlein called Beyond Code.
Conclusion
I am really glad that they are able now to work each day on BotMan and provide more and more features. So please check out the course, learn a ton of stuff and help your favourite chatbot library to grow at the same time. I am already looking forward to the next videos, because Marcel is planning to release about 2 hours of more videos which will be included as well.