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A young woman on a Madrid street at night, her face lit by her phone, with city lights blurred behind her.
#ai#web

WTHUFF

El HuffPost's chatbot across social networks

> for grupo prisa · via officer & gentlemanplatform · 2023
01· the project
> A project for Grupo Prisa, with Officer & Gentleman.

A question on WhatsApp, answered with the news.

WTHUFF was El HuffPost's chatbot for its eleventh-anniversary campaign, En un mundo WTF, respuestas #WTHUFF, made with Officer & Gentleman. You wrote #wthuff and a few keywords in an Instagram comment, a DM, a story mention, Messenger or WhatsApp, and it replied in private with the paper's articles.

We built it serverless on AWS: functions that receive and anonymise each message, a processor and a sender for each network, and an Algolia search over the archive that favours the latest news and, on long-running topics, features and explainers. It speaks in the campaign's colloquial tone, greets back and teaches the format to anyone who misspells the hashtag.

> cat /works/wthuff.md
TYPEPLATFORM
CLIENTGRUPO PRISA
AGENCYOFFICER & GENTLEMAN
YEAR2023
LOCATIONMADRID
built with
  • AWS Step Functions
  • AWS Lambda
  • API Gateway
  • Node.js
  • Algolia
  • Meta Graph API
  • WhatsApp Cloud API
#ai #web
02· in numbers
3> networks: Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp
1–3> articles in each reply
11th> El HuffPost anniversary
03· how it works
Instagram DM with El HuffPost: a reply card about fines for racist abuse against Vinícius, and #wthuff being typed in the message box.
01

Ask

You write

The architecture diagram: messages from Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp go through receivers, processors and senders to the Algolia search.
02

Receive

Functions on AWS receive the message from Meta, anonymise it and process it for its network.

The Step Functions graph: a branch per social network, the Algolia searcher and the conversation generator.
03

Search

Algolia searches El HuffPost's archive, latest news first and, on long-running topics, features and explainers.

Messenger chat with the bot: two El HuffPost article cards with photo and headline, each with a share button.
04

Reply

The bot answers in private with one to three articles, and teaches the format to anyone who misspells the hashtag.

04· gallery
Instagram DM with El HuffPost: the bot says it found plenty of results and sends the latest, an article card with a photo of a singer on stage.
> wthuff · 01
Instagram DM with El HuffPost: after a greeting it does not understand, the bot explains the format, and "#wthuff Vinicius" gets an upbeat "Hey! Leeeet's go!".
> wthuff · 02
Agency mockup of the campaign: an underpass wall covered in posters, with WTF? turning into #WTHUFF, and a cyclist passing.
> wthuff · 03 · agency mockup
Agency mockup of the campaign: a hoarding of El HuffPost posters with large headlines and the #wthuff call to action.
> wthuff · 04 · agency mockup
05· credits
for grupo prisa. via officer & gentleman. CHATBOT - AWS. 2023

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06· next project
> cd /works/defsense
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