Tool needed: Support Engineer Matrix Bot Assistant

[lovelaced]

Describe your problem and idea for the tool

What you would like us to build? Which problem does it solve? What are the most important features this tool should have?

From Ricardo:

Related to bots, are you able to get the emoticons message reactions. I'm thinking on another thing we need, not important for now but will come handy later on.
The general idea is to create a new gihub issue in a private repo once a emoticon reaction happens on a specific message. As a way to filter and track good questions.
hhmm I was thinking on this for the Substrate technical channel. As a way to prevent creating a new ticketing platform but allowing Support engineers to spend less time answering the same question over and over.

My pseudo-psuedocode:

We could do something like...

as support_helper_matrix_bot:
if
[any person from list of approved matrix accounts] reacts with [specific emoji] to [post]; then
post as issue on github
post a link to the issue it created
fi

How do you solve this problem now?

What workarounds have you already tried? Do you have any docs describing these processes? Have you tried any opensource tools or found articles that could theoretically help us with that?

I'll let @riusricardo explain more here if needed. In the past, it was attempted to redirect people to StackOverflow to avoid repeating the same answers to the same questions over and over, but Github Discussions (or issues) is a better outlet.

Importance and impact

Between low and medium

Deadline

None

[joao-paulo-parity]

Github Discussions (or issues) is a better outlet

I think it'd be better to have our own self-hosted "knowledge base" (could be a new or existing open-source project). There one would be able to filter the questions more freely, however they want. It could also would work for all projects company-wide, even ones not related to code (not everyone uses Github).

as support_helper_matrix_bot:
if
[any person from list of approved matrix accounts] reacts with [specific emoji] to [post]; then
post as issue on github
post a link to the issue it created
fi

I think it'd be good to have the bot auto-detect similar questions asked before in the knowledge base. StackOverflow does this before you open a new question there.

For our workflow it'd be:

1. User asks in Matrix "How to do X?"
2. Bots reads his comment and says "Similar questions have been asked before: [link], [link], ...`
3. In case no answer has been given before, the support person can create an item in the knowledge base:

Topic: The question asked
Body: The answer
Other ways to phrase the question: self-explanatory
Tags: substrate, polkadot, parachains, etc, etc...

Note: this process of creating the item could be automated by emoji reactions on Matrix or some other means.

As a bonus: Like Github Discussions, the item could be "forum-based" (like Discourse) so that the community can contribute answers there; this is not strictly necessary, though, as opening to the public requires moderation which is also something to think about. Furthermore, forum-based discussion is not really needed for internal needs.

To be clear about "not reinventing the wheel", the proposed solution:

• Should be queryable by the bot: have a way to access the knowledge base easily for detecting previous questions
• Should be queryable by humans: it should be fast for someone to find whatever they want (filter by tags, dates, etc)
• Should provide this "Other ways to phrase the question"

The whole proposal could be summarized as a "queryable knowledge base". Github Discussions is cumbersome for this idea but maybe it could work.