Currency conversions have kept pace with the digital age. With the rapid advancement of technology in the digital age, currency conversion transactions have accelerated. Both individual users and small/medium/large businesses convert currency every day for different reasons. Today, it is quite possible to convert hundreds of official currencies around the world in just milliseconds through a single application.
Another result of the era’s shift to digital and the development of technology has been chatbots. Advances in artificial intelligence and the rise of messaging have allowed chatbots to be accepted as a means by which companies communicate with their customers. Today, the use of chatbots has become widespread, especially in the service sector, from finance to airlines, from e-commerce to health. Banking chatbots, shopping chatbots, human resources chatbots, food ordering chatbots are the first things that come to mind, but of course it is possible to extend the list.
Especially in financial applications, we can see chatbots that make currency conversions automatically. We will simulate a currency conversion chatbot with the Exchangerates API.
Integration Exchangerates API to PHP programming language
Chatbots on their websites use very powerful artificial intelligence algorithms in the background. The chatbot we will build in this section will send a request to a Rest service written in PHP, and this rest service will communicate with the Exchangerates API integrated into the system and transmit the data to the chatbot. In this part, Exchangerates API, which provides currency conversion API service to PHP programming language, will be integrated and the rest will be simulated.
An API key is needed to integrate and use the Exchangerates API, which provides Currency conversion API service to the application. You can get an API key by choosing one of the affordable and flexible packages on the official website of Exchangerates.
After obtaining the API key, we paste the following code block into the PHP project.
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<?php $client = new http\Client; $request = new http\Client\Request; $request->setRequestUrl('http://api.exchangeratesapi.io/v1/convert?access_key=b5*****5&from=USD&to=EUR&amount=10'); $request->setRequestMethod('GET'); $request->setOptions(array()); $client->enqueue($request)->send(); $response = $client->getResponse(); echo $response.result->getBody(); |
When this code runs, we will show the following output from the chatbot to the user.Let’s assume that the values in the ‘from’, ‘to’ and ‘amount’ fields in the above code block are the values entered by the user in the chatbot. This code takes the conversion information of the value entered from the chatbot with the Exchangerates API and prints it to the console of the application. Let’s say we send the value printed to the console back to the chatbot with the rest service.
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9.2485064 |
Assuming that the chatbot changes the values entered by the user, let’s run our code once again.
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<?php $client = new http\Client; $request = new http\Client\Request; $request->setRequestUrl('http://api.exchangeratesapi.io/v1/convert?access_key=b5*****5&from=USD&to=TRY&amount=10'); $request->setRequestMethod('GET'); $request->setOptions(array()); $client->enqueue($request)->send(); $response = $client->getResponse(); echo $response.result->getBody(); |
When this code runs, we will show the following output from the chatbot to the user.
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146.28626 |
Conclusion
Currency conversion with up-to-date data for hundreds of currencies in just milliseconds is possible with the Exchangerates API. You can add it to your applications as both a chatbot service and a currency converter service.
