Telebot for Restaurant Reservation

A Telegram chatbot that lets customers browse a restaurant menu, reserve a table, and receive an e-mail + QR confirmation — all inside a Telegram conversation. The bot uses Google Cloud NLP to understand free-text queries, Google Cloud Datastore for persistent storage, and Redis for session caching.

Demo Video: Watch on Google Drive

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Table of Contents

• Features
• Architecture
• Bot Conversation Flow
• Project Structure
• Prerequisites
• Installation
• Configuration
• Running Locally
• Deploying to Google App Engine
• Telegram Commands & Queries

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Features

Feature	Details
🆕 New-user detection	Greets first-time visitors, offers a 30 % first-booking discount
🔁 Returning-user flow	Fetches last reservation from Cloud Datastore and offers to re-book with the same details
📋 Menu display	Sends the restaurant menu as a photo
📅 Interactive calendar	Inline calendar keyboard for date selection
⏰ Time-slot selection	Four time-slot buttons (Morning / Afternoon / Evening / Night)
👥 Party-size selection	Numeric keyboard for 1–9 guests
🔖 QR confirmation	Generates a unique QR code (using qrcode) sent in-chat
📧 E-mail confirmation	Sends a booking summary to the customer's e-mail via Gmail
🧠 NLP intent detection	Google Cloud Natural Language API extracts entities & sentiment from free-text messages
☁️ Cloud persistence	Reservations stored in Google Cloud Datastore
⚡ Session caching	Redis stores per-user state across message handlers

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Architecture

┌──────────────┐     Telegram Bot API      ┌──────────────────────────┐
│   Telegram   │ ◄────────────────────────► │   main.py  (TeleBot)     │
│   Client     │                            │                          │
└──────────────┘                            │  ┌────────────────────┐  │
                                            │  │  utility.py        │  │
                                            │  │  (orchestration)   │  │
                                            │  └────────┬───────────┘  │
                                            │           │              │
                          ┌─────────────────┼───────────┼──────────┐  │
                          │                 │           │          │  │
                   ┌──────▼──────┐  ┌───────▼───────┐  │  ┌───────▼──┴──┐
                   │  gc_nlp     │  │  gc_datastore  │  │  │   Redis     │
                   │  (Google    │  │  (Google Cloud │  │  │  (session   │
                   │   NLP API)  │  │   Datastore)   │  │  │   cache)    │
                   └─────────────┘  └────────────────┘  │  └─────────────┘
                                                         │
                                                  ┌──────▼──────┐
                                                  │  Gmail API  │
                                                  │  (e-mail    │
                                                  │  confirm.)  │
                                                  └─────────────┘

Hosted on: Google App Engine (Flexible Environment, Python 3)

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Bot Conversation Flow

/start
  │
  ├─ New user ──► Welcome + 30% discount offer
  │                │
  │                ├─ "Menu"          ──► Send menu photo ──► Offer table reservation
  │                └─ "Reserve Table" ──► Ask party size ──► Calendar ──► Time slot
  │                                                                │
  │                                                                └─► Booking summary
  │                                                                    ──► QR code
  │                                                                    ──► E-mail confirmation
  │
  └─ Returning user ──► Show last reservation details
                         │
                         ├─ "Yes" (same details) ──► Calendar ──► QR + E-mail
                         └─ "No"  (new details)  ──► Menu or new reservation flow

Free-text queries (via Google NLP):
  "can I see the menu?"          ──► Menu flow
  "reserve a table for me"       ──► Reservation flow
  "what are your timings?"       ──► Opening hours message

---

Project Structure

Telebot-for-Restaurant-Reservation/
├── main.py                  # Bot entry-point; all Telegram handlers
├── utility.py               # Helper functions (NLP, Datastore, Gmail)
├── config.py                # Configuration (tokens, credentials, Redis)
├── app.yaml                 # Google App Engine deployment config
├── requirements.txt         # Python dependencies
├── tox.ini                  # Tox configuration
├── task_flow.txt            # Original task specification & solution notes
│
├── gc_nlp/
│   └── gc_nlp.py            # Google Cloud Natural Language API wrapper
│
├── gc_datastore/
│   ├── gc_datastore.py      # Google Cloud Datastore CRUD helpers
│   └── index.yaml           # Datastore composite index definitions
│
├── others/
│   ├── calender.py          # Inline calendar keyboard builder
│   └── menu.jpg             # Restaurant menu image
│
└── Demo_Video/
    └── Demo_Video.mp4       # Recorded demo

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Prerequisites

• Python 3.6+
• A Telegram Bot token — create one via @BotFather
• A Google Cloud Platform project with the following APIs enabled:
  • Cloud Natural Language API
  • Cloud Datastore API
• A Google service-account JSON key with roles for Datastore and NLP
• Redis server (local or hosted, e.g. Redis Labs)
• A Gmail account with "Allow less secure apps" enabled (or an App Password)

---

Installation

# 1. Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/SouravAggarwal/Telebot-for-Restaurant-Reservation.git
cd Telebot-for-Restaurant-Reservation

# 2. Create and activate a virtual environment (recommended)
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate   # Windows: venv\Scripts\activate

# 3. Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

# 4. Install Redis (Ubuntu/Debian)
sudo apt-get install redis-server
sudo service redis-server start

---

Configuration

Edit config.py and replace the placeholder values:

RESTAURANT_NAME = "Your Restaurant Name"

# Telegram Bot token from @BotFather
TELGRAM_TOKEN = '<your-telegram-bot-token>'

# Absolute path to your GCP service-account JSON key
AUTH_FILE = '/path/to/your-service-account.json'

# Gmail credentials for sending confirmation e-mails
gmail_id   = "your-email@gmail.com"
gmail_pass = "your-password"        # Use an App Password if 2FA is enabled

# Redis connection (local default shown; switch to hosted if needed)
r = redis.StrictRedis(host='localhost', port=6379, db=0)

⚠️ Never commit real credentials to version control. Consider using environment variables or a secrets manager in production.

---

Running Locally

# Make sure Redis is running
sudo service redis-server start

# Start the bot
python main.py

The bot will begin long-polling Telegram for updates. Open Telegram, find your bot by its username, and send /start.

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Deploying to Google App Engine

The project includes an app.yaml configured for the App Engine Flexible Environment:

runtime: python
env: flex
entrypoint: gunicorn -b :$PORT main:app
runtime_config:
  python_version: 3

# Authenticate with GCP
gcloud auth login
gcloud config set project <your-gcp-project-id>

# Deploy
gcloud app deploy app.yaml

Note: The current main.py uses bot.polling() (long-polling), which is suitable for local development. For App Engine deployment, switch to a webhook-based approach using Flask to expose a /webhook endpoint and call bot.process_new_updates().

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Telegram Commands & Queries

Command / Query	Description
/start	Begin or restart the conversation
/new	Trigger the new-user menu (Menu or Reserve a Table)
/hello	Simple ping to check if the bot is alive
"can I see the menu?"	NLP-detected → sends the menu photo
"reserve a table for me"	NLP-detected → starts the reservation flow
"what are your timings?"	NLP-detected → sends opening hours

Opening hours returned by the bot:

• Weekdays: 9:00 am – 11:00 pm
• Weekends: 8:30 am – 11:30 pm