MindfulHacks Discord Bot

Bot sends youtube links
Keyword detected

Inspiration

We were interested in using technology to help youths/young adults who may not be aware of their mental health issues nor have the necessary coping mechanisms or social support to help them through difficult times. A chatbot will be a user-friendly tool for those who are not ready to seek or might not require professional help yet.

Functionality

It scans for certain keywords such as “anxious” and responds with the appropriate Music Videos from Youtube.

How we built it

This project involves the use of Python, Discord, and Youtube API. We make use of an online IDE platform, replit.com, to collaborate and do the coding together.

Challenges we ran into

Challenge 1

We were initially confused as to how to compare words in 2 different lists. Thus, we tried to understand the problem, that is do we truly understand the context behind it? Next, we tried to split the problem into smaller problems but it did not work. Thus we did some research and found that we had to use nested loops.

Challenge 2

We did not know how to search and filter out the results from youtube. We decided to procrastinate the problem by dumping the results into a text file then dealing with it later. Next, we analyzed the dumped text in the text file. We realized that there is a certain pattern: there will always be “something”: “value”. We looked at the main “something” that we wanted and realized that “videoID” was the most important one. We tried using Regular expressions - re.findall, but it did not work well as the result (a list) is empty. We then searched online and came up with a solution

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have successfully built a discord bot without having knowledge of using python at the start.

What we learned

We learned how to use python to build a discord bot that can take videos from youtube and reply with the link for the video.

What's next for Discord python bot

We can use this python code to add some A.I feature to see if the person is legitimately sad or not so as to counter those who abuse the bot that we have built. We can also make it so that the bot can give empathetic messages to encourage those who are sad. We can also make it so that other users can also add in more messages if they know a certain code (e.g $add). However, the list of encouraging messages should be monitored frequently to ensure that inappropriate messages are not left behind. We can also make it such that the bot will provide relevant hotlines according to the mental health issues the person is facing. e.g Suicide Prevention Hotline.