Buddybot

Is a buddy. And a bot. He wants to be your friend! Definitely not out to take over the human race or anything, he just wants to be your friend!

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Inspiration

Honestly we were both curious about creating a chatbot, and I wanted to play around with the Watson AI to see if it could make a good AI bot. (spoiler alert: it can't, at least not what I envisioned.)

What it does

It is essentially a very early build of an AI bot that will basically be your best friend. At it's current build, it basically has Alexa capabilities, however there is ONE thing it can do. It can create it's own opinions! When you tell it about a piece of media you like, say for instance "Endgame," it will go, 'watch' the movie, and provide it's own feedback. It can even tell funny jokes! (or not so funny, depending on your version of a funny joke.)

How we built it

Originally I wanted to build it using Watson AI. That... gave WAY too many challenges. Maria started coding in Python while I kept on trying to figure out how to make Watson do what I wanted to do. The program Maria made uses several SpeechRecognition and TTS libraries, and natural language processing libraries. For forming opinions, it uses an nltk library to get a sentiment classification.

Challenges we ran into

The one MAJOR problem we ran into was WatsonAI. It was confusing to use, there were a bunch of menus, it wasn't streamlined at all, in my opinion. Also, the one major feature we wanted in the project we needed to pay for, so that's not a thing that's happening. Luckily, Maria had already programmed a working chatbot for us to use.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The fact I was able to be a part of a team that developed a chatbot that went above and beyond what I was expecting.

What we learned

Don't use new toys for competitions or else you may end up losing sleep.

What's next for Buddybot

For now, I want to fine tune the "opinion-making" portion of it, myself. I want to introduce movies that have bad reviews and let buddybot make a negative opinion of a movie. Also, I want to incorporate more friendship or chatbot type of ideas, like having AI make ASCII art of something. For me, this is definitely going to be a toy project for me.

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