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what technology and would be it be open source? or how would that work? self hosted/Saas?

I’m most experienced with Python, and I was going to make it work both as hosted and self-hosted.

Since most 'chatbot' stuff are callbacks, maybe Zappa might help you: https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa

You can host it yourself, or deploy it as a lambda/cloud function/etc.