NongHed is a chatbot who could provide you with up-to-date economic and financial data for Thailand. See NongHed’s homepage here.
Background
When I started my job at the Bank of Thailand, one of the first things I noticed is how data-oriented the organization is. Questions like, “What was last month’s export growth?” or “What was the current account last year?” consistently pop up.
While most people could recall these numbers off the top of their head (or at least have some rough numbers), newcomers often find it hard to recall these numbers and would have to flip through their giant folders to look up the numbers. The same goes for “infrequently asked numbers” that even veterans sometimes find troublesome.
Existing solution(s)
BOT Statistics
Indeed, the Bank of Thailand has a ginormous statistics portal with tens of thousands of series covering everything from total loans in the banking system to quantity of pineapples exported each month. So theoretically anybody could look up the numbers from there.
The problem? The statistics portal is ginormous. Unless you know exactly which table number to look at, you’ll likely find yourself poking around different tables and end up unsure which one is the series you want.
Friends
Next up are friends. You use your favorite instant messaging means (LINE, Facebook Messenger, etc.) and ask your veteran friends or people in the respective teams to help you look it up. Of course, the problem with this approach is that your friend might not always be there for you.
Comes along NongHed
NongHed was meant to be that friend who would always be there for you (to provide Help with Economic Data, of course). The idea is that the user could simply ask the chatbot with these questions you’d normally ask your friends, and NongHed will answer them for you, 24/7.
NongHed is available on both LINE and Facebook, and you can start chatting with him (her?) right away.
Architecture
When you chat with NongHed, your request goes through respective platform’s messaging API, which then forward your requests to Google’s Dialogflow. From there, simpler requests like “Hi” or “What’s your name” are handled directly by Dialogflow, while data-related requests are forwarded to an API hosted on Heroku.
This backend is written in Python and handles everything from updating data to parsing dates (Dialogflow doesn’t do a particularly good job of handling quarterly dates) to doing requested calculations.
Data
The data NongHed has comes from several sources.
Bank of Thailand’s API
The Bank of Thailand has made its statistics (yes, those tables) available through BOT API since 2017. This is a huge step forward in making public data accessible, and I sincerely thank the people who have made this possible.
BOT API itself is easy enough to use, but is intended for power users (read: people who can code.) So one can think of NongHed as a user-friendly frontend for BOT API.
Making more than 20,000 series in BOT API available to NongHed users
could make things as confusing for users,
so I chose only series that are queried frequently
(currently there are around 40 series).
Adding more series from BOT API is as simple as adding a row in a .csv file.
For faster results, data from BOT API are pulled automatically every day into a local copy.
Other government agencies
Huge as it is, BOT API only contains data compiled by the Bank of Thailand. Important economic series like GDP (compiled by NESDC) or inflation (compiled by MOC) are not included in the BOT API. As a result, these data have to be pulled separately via available means.
Other sources
Other—mostly live—data are scraped through many sources. and I guess we’ll have to be sneaky-sneaky about that ;)
Looking forward
I hope to add more useful features for NongHed in the future.
Suggestions are more than welcome!
If you have any suggestions or questions,
please send them to nonghed.bot@gmail.com.
All of the cloud services I use for this project (LINE Official Account, Facebook Messenger, Dialogflow, Heroku) are on a free tier. This means there are certain limitations like number of messages that NongHed can handle in an hour, or an uptime that might not be guaranteed. If you find NongHed helpful and would like to support continued development, please feel free to support NongHed!
Sorry for a long post. Here’s a potato! 🥔
Fun factSeptember 20 is Global Magic Mushroom Day!