This is a service to serve quotes and bios of famous women in STEM. It is used as the webhook for a demo conversational agent built with Dialogflow for the "Building a Conversational Agent" workshop at the 2017 Grace Hopper Conference.

The service is written using Flask-RESTful and deployed using App Engine on Google Cloud Platform.

Before running or deploying, install the dependencies using pip:

pip install -t lib -r requirements.txt

To run the service locally, you can run

dev_appserver.py .

Then you can test an example request:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/quotesearch -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"queryResult": {"action": "get_quote_event", "parameters": {"author": "Grace Hopper", "topic": "technology"}}}' 

Example response:

{"followupEventInput": {"parameters": {"author": "Grace Hopper", "quote": "The application of systems techniques has been successful in scientific and technical applications . . . It meets difficulty when it is applied in social and political situations largely because people are not 'well-behaved' mathematical functions, but can only be represented by statistical approximations, and all of the extremes can and do occur."}, "name": "respond_with_quote"}}

To deploy, run

gcloud app deploy app.yaml

The service has one endpoint '/quotesearch'. It accepts POST requests with Content-type application/json as sent by Dialogflow. See the full request format here. It handles 4 actions:

Action	Body	Output
get_quote_event Get a quote response as a followup event.	{  …  "queryResult": {   "parameters": {    "author": "Grace Hopper",    "topic": "computers"   },   "action": "get_quote_event"   …  } } Both parameters are optional.	{  "followupEventInput": {   "name": "respond_with_quote",     "parameters": {    "quote": "computers",    "author": "Grace Hopper"   }  } } If there is no applicable quote, |name| will be "quote_not_found" instead.
get_quote_response Get a quote response as response text.	Same as above, except "action": "get_quote_response"	{  "fulfillmentText": "Here’s a quote..." }
get_bio_event Get an author bio response as a followup event.	{  …  "queryResult": {   "parameters": {    "author": "Grace Hopper"   },   "action": "get_bio_event"   …  } } The |author| parameter is required.	{ "followupEventInput": {   "name": "respond_with_bio",     "parameters": {    "bio": "Grace Hopper..."   }  } } If there is no matching bio, |name| will be "bio_not_found" instead.
get_bio_response Get an author bio response as response text.	Same as above, except "action": "get_bio_response"	{  "fulfillmentText": "Here’s the bio..." }