What it does Stealth is a Ruby framework for building text and voice chatbots. It borrows Rails’s “convention over configuration” ethos, giving you an MVC structure where “views” are called “replies” — a small semantic honesty that saves confusion. You deploy it as a standard Rack app, with incoming webhooks queued through Sidekiq.

The interesting bit The “variants” system lets one codebase serve multiple messaging platforms (Facebook Messenger, Twilio SMS, Bandwidth, Smooch) without forking your logic. Voice gets a look-in too via an early-alpha Alexa integration. NLP and analytics plug in as gems, so you’re not locked into a single vendor’s black box.

Key highlights

• Redis-backed sessions with explicit state-machine semantics
• Sidekiq queue for webhook processing
• Built-in catch-alls, hello/goodbye flows — the boring reliability stuff
• Semantic versioning “like the Linux Kernel” (their words, not mine — major bumps are arbitrary, nothing breaks)
• Docs live in a GitHub wiki; the maintainers treat doc gaps as bugs

Caveats

• Alexa support is flagged “early alpha”
• 597 stars suggests a modest community; check gem maintenance cadence before betting production on it

Verdict Ruby shops already running Rails/Sidekiq/Redis stacks will find the mental model familiar. If you’re in Python- or Node-land, the framework offers little migration incentive. Worth a spin for greenfield bot projects where “just another Rack app” simplifies your infrastructure story.