🔥Building a Slack Bot with AI Capabilities - Part 6, adding support for DOC/X, XLS/X, PDF, and More to Chat with your Data🔥

aka, please don't make me create a pivot table, I'd rather just ask you

This blog series focuses on presenting complex DevOps projects as simple and approachable via plain language and lots of pictures. You can do it!

This article is part of a series of articles, because 1 article would be absolutely massive.

• Part 1: Covers how to build a slack bot in websocket mode and connect to it with python

• Part 2: How to deploy an AWS Bedrock AI resource and connect to it to ask a request locally from your terminal with python3

• Part 3: We’ll connect our slack bot with Bedrock locally using python3 with ngrok so slack users can have conversations with AI

• Part 4: How to convert your local script to an event-driven serverless, cloud-based app in AWS Lambda

• Part 5: Building a RAG Knowledge Base of an entire Confluence wiki, and teaching our Slack Bot to Read it in RealTime

• Part 6 (this article): Switching to the .converse() API to support DOC/DOCX, XLS/XLSX, PDF, and others to chat with your data

• Part 7: Streaming token responses from AWS Bedrock to your AI Slack bot using converse_stream()

• Part 8: ReRanking knowledge base responses to improve AI model response efficacy

• Part 9 (coming soon!): Adding a Lambda Receiver tier to reduce cost and improve Slack response time

Hey all!

So far we’ve built a functional chatbot using AWS Lambda and Bedrock, and had it read our entire confluence so it can talk to us about it. That’s so cool!

But on the user-facing side, we can only talk to it via image or text. We did include Slack “snippets”, which are sort of like code blocks, but what if I want the AI to:

• Read a PDF contract of mine to summarize what I’m agreeing to?

• Look at the sales data spreadsheet from the past quarter and identify if there’s any clients that aren’t spending quite as much as last quarter?

• Read my project proposal document and give me some tips?

• Read the resume of an upcoming interviewee and let me know some questions to test their knowledge level versus a job description?

The bot doesn’t yet have the ability to read documents, but as you can probably guess from this article’s title and my build-up, we’re going to teach it!!

Here’s an example of analyzing a resume:

Since we can have long conversations with Vera, we can give her a job description and also a candidate resume and get feedback on what we should ask the candidate to talk about their perceived gaps.

Vera can also analyze contracts and explain what you’re agreeing to, which is a really useful talent, particularly for private AI use cases.

With no further ado, lets do it!!

If you’d rather skip all this walk-through and read the code yourself, the repo at github/kymidd/SlackAIBotServerless is public and MIT licensed for free use ;)