Getting started with Abbot

So you've just installed Abbot (congratulations!) and want to write a skill.

Abbot tries to make building skills as painless as possible, and offers some convenience methods to you so that you don't have to deal with them.

You can write skills in C#, Python, or JavaScript. We are adding new features and language support all the time, but pick your favorite one of these three and let's get started!

Unsure which language to start with? Abbot allows you to use all of these languages in a single bot, so you can experiment with each language and see what works best for you. If you really aren't sure, Abbot is built in C#, and it's what we use to build most of our skills. We like using C# for skills because static typing makes it easy to reason about our code, and the editing experience on https://ab.bot is pretty good!

Please note that once you save a skill in Abbot's web editor, that skill is live in your chat. You can test locally before saving, if you'd like.