TSFormBot — A Google Form Hangouts Chat Bot powered by Google Apps Script

3 min readApr 5, 2018

It’s no secret that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the way we live. But what I find exciting as a productivity and workflow automation advocate is the promise of AI to spawn the many virtual assistants we need for the manual, tedious tasks performed every day … both in our business and personal workflows. So I was very intrigued by the new release of Google’s Hangouts Chat which allows AI to be injected into chat conversations via Bots.

In this post, I’m introducing a simple Hangouts Chat Bot (aka TSFormBot) I created to post to a Hangouts Chat room every time a submission is made to a Google Form … but first let’s get our bearings in this interesting new world.

What is Google Hangouts Chat?

Hangouts Chat is Google’s response to the rising tide of chat apps (including Slack, Stride, Microsoft Teams, and Workplace by Facebook) which provide team communication and messaging solutions for the workplace.

In Hangouts Chat, teams create dedicated workspaces (known as “rooms”) where members communicate, share resources, manage projects and perform other collaborative tasks. In addition, Hangouts Chat provides direct messaging so team members can have 1:1 conversations along with powerful search and mobile access for productivity in the office and on-the-go.

One of the most important features of Hangouts Chat is its deep integration with G Suite which is critical to the many businesses, schools, governments and non-profits running on the G Suite platform.

See additional Hangouts Chat features.

What is a Hangouts Chat Bot?

A Hangouts Chat Bot is a software service which acts as conversational partner to deliver tools, services or resources to those conversations. Bots are designed to respond to Hangouts Chat direct messages, participate in chat rooms or a combination of the two.

Hangouts Chat Bots can be fashioned to respond to conversations (or initiate conversations) which inform, notify or allow team members to take action. Bots can integrate with G Suite services as well as 3rd party services, some of which already have bots integrated with Hangouts Chat (e.g. Salesforce, Trello and Github).

TSFormBot — A Google Form Submission Notification Bot

Google Forms are used everywhere these days and many are integral to business workflows.

Whether you’re a manager tracking employee time-off requests, a customer support engineer responding to help desk tickets, a school teacher or administrator tracking students or an event coordinator managing event registrations … you’ve most likely created or used Google Forms within your G Suite domain. Why not bring those form submission notifications into team collaboration?

That’s why I created TSFormBot … a simple Google Form bot which notifies team members in a Hangouts Chat room every time a submission is made to a bot enabled form. The bot notifications provide linked buttons to both the form and to the submitted response for easy access.