The tech space is always in ‘motion’ – constantly evolving with new trends emerging every day. In recent years, we’ve seen the sprout, growth, shift, and rise in areas such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the Internet of Things. These technologies are shaping the way we live and work while having a profound impact on industries ranging from manufacturing, and healthcare to finance as well. As technology advances, we can anticipate even more exciting developments in the future. Here are some of the tech trends to watch in 2023.
1) Chatbots
This technology has evolved from rule-based chatbots to AI-driven chatbots. In the recent past, there has been mass adoption of chatbots as seen in Github Copilot, ChatGPT, and even search engines like You.com where they are introducing YouChat. Quora is also testing Poe – an AI-powered chatbot to enable its users to get instant responses and engage in back-and-forth conversations.
This conclusively shows that the future of search is chatbots. What’s the point of navigating 5-10 web pages if I can simply engage an embedded chatbot on an e-commerce website? Now let’s build a simple chatbot in hypertext preprocessor to say ‘hello from Techweez’. To save time, we are going to build on top of existing messaging platforms such as Facebook, Whatsapp, and Telegram. In this case, Telegram API is the best platform since it’s 100% self-onboarding and doesn’t need approvals.
Steps: Creating a Chatbot on Telegram
Step 1: Text bot father @botFather, click new bot, then enter your preferred bot name and username.
Step 2: Copy the API access token and register a webhook for your bot. To register the webhook, append your token to this URL https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOUR_API_TOKEN>/setwebhook?url=LINK_TO_YOUR_CALLBACK_WEBHOOK. Paste the URL in a browser and load.
NB: The webhook MUST be a in publicly accessible domain or IP address. If you don’t have a domain, you can get one here or use a tunnel such as ngrok for Telegram to communicate with your local host. You should get a success message like this.
Step 3: Add logic to your webhook.
<?php
$endpoint="https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOUR_API_ACCESS_TOKEN>/";
$update=json_decode(file_get_contents("php://input"));
$threadId = $update->callback_query->from->id;
$username = $update->callback_query->from->first_name;
$message= "Hello $username, greetings from Techweez.";
file_get_contents($endpoint."sendMessage?chat_id=".$threadId."&text=$message");
?>Step 4: Test your bot. You can test our ‘Hello Techweez‘ bot here.
2) Headless CMS
For decades, WordPress, Joomla, and other ‘traditional‘ content management systems have been at the forefront of no-code tools used to create web applications. However, these tools come with drawbacks such as multiple security vulnerabilities, less scalable, and rigid architecture among others.
Recently, there has been a rise in headless CMS- a new generation and breed of content management systems that render content through API allowing developers to use their desired tools and programming language without an inbuilt front end or presentation layer. They also provide a higher level of security and scalability. In this article, we are going to look at Strapi CMS. It is the most popular headless CMS, open-source, and 100% Javascript. So if you hate WordPress, it’s time to migrate to Strapi and use Javascript.
Strapi features
- TypeScript support: As a developer, you can now create and write code lines in TypeScript files. During the development phase, all of these files will be automatically compiled.
- Auto-generated documentation: You can create and maintain documentation with a single click.
- Webhooks: Call back anywhere you need, to implement your desired functionalities.
- API Token: Strapi has an improved token-based authentication with custom permissions.
- GraphQL or RESTful: You can Consume the API from any client (React, Vue, Angular), mobile apps, or even IoT, using REST or GraphQL.
- Multi-databases support: Strapi supports SQLite, MySQL, and Postgres database engines.
Other headless content management systems include Ghost, TinaCMS, and Directus.
