On the Laravel News site today there's a new post covering the release of BotMan v2.0, one of the more popular chatbot libraries for PHP.

BotMan is a framework agnostic PHP Chatbot framework designed to simplify the task of developing innovative bots for multiple messaging platforms, including Slack, Telegram, Microsoft Bot Framework, Nexmo, HipChat, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and many more.

BotMan 2.0 was released earlier this week with a bunch of improvements and exciting changes.

As a part of this new release, functionality was abstracted out into separate repositories making it easier to maintain those features without having to change core code. They then include an example of using the the library to create a simple chatbot that replies to a simple "hello" message. They also cover some of the more advanced features including middleware handling and natural language processing support. There's also a tool, BotMan Studio, that's included with the package to help make testing your chatbot script easier. The post wraps up with an example of using this to test the chatbot and a list of some of the other new features in v2.0.