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Chat bot ideas?

I'm struggling with ideas. I need to make a simple program that answers any questions that the user asks. I guess it doesn't have to give a 'right' answer to their question but it should respond differently for the things they ask.
I should add - the chat bot needs to in some way be helpful or useful e.g. helping with some kind of issue the user asks about
This arguably isn't that simple of a problem, chatbots are fairly complex.

In terms of just simple "ask and reply" the simplest thing you can do is to check the user's query for certain keywords, and answer based on that. So you'd have a series of responses, and a bunch of keywords to determine which response to use. However this hardly constitutes a chatbot, and you'd run into all sorts of problems. For example what if you get multiple keywords, which is highly likely as you add more responses.

If this is a project you've chosen yourself, it may be worth considering something simpler.
Original post by AcseI
This arguably isn't that simple of a problem, chatbots are fairly complex.

In terms of just simple "ask and reply" the simplest thing you can do is to check the user's query for certain keywords, and answer based on that. So you'd have a series of responses, and a bunch of keywords to determine which response to use. However this hardly constitutes a chatbot, and you'd run into all sorts of problems. For example what if you get multiple keywords, which is highly likely as you add more responses.

If this is a project you've chosen yourself, it may be worth considering something simpler.

I figured it would need to include a lot of guidance for the user. It is meant to be a very basic program and I like your idea of giving the user a choice. I could try put their choice as an argument although I'm not entirely sure.
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Shadow17
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I think that with this question you better turn to GitHub. There are many experts in the field who will give you good advice and tips.
Original post by Carrying a torch
I figured it would need to include a lot of guidance for the user. It is meant to be a very basic program and I like your idea of giving the user a choice. I could try put their choice as an argument although I'm not entirely sure.

The problem you end up with here is the more guidance you have to give, the less of a chatbot it is. Because you're just telling the user to provide some predefined and accepted input, then returning a predefined response. You effectively end up with "if input 1, output A. If input 2, output B" and so on.

I think you need to take a step back and reconsider the question. You're making a simple program that responds differently based on some user input. What sort of input are you going to get? And how do you want the responses to vary? Get some examples of this and work from there
Original post by AcseI
The problem you end up with here is the more guidance you have to give, the less of a chatbot it is. Because you're just telling the user to provide some predefined and accepted input, then returning a predefined response. You effectively end up with "if input 1, output A. If input 2, output B" and so on.

I think you need to take a step back and reconsider the question. You're making a simple program that responds differently based on some user input. What sort of input are you going to get? And how do you want the responses to vary? Get some examples of this and work from there

You make good points. I guess the whole idea is at a low level version, my program should be helpful by allowing users to specify what knowledge they want by picking a predefined topic they want info about. At a higher level and as I improve, I can definitely look into how to make my program more of a chat bot rather than just like an informant. For example, I could think about trigger words. And I could try get my program to keep on asking questions literally until the user says I give up you're just too smart for me
Original post by Carrying a torch
You make good points. I guess the whole idea is at a low level version, my program should be helpful by allowing users to specify what knowledge they want by picking a predefined topic they want info about. At a higher level and as I improve, I can definitely look into how to make my program more of a chat bot rather than just like an informant. For example, I could think about trigger words. And I could try get my program to keep on asking questions literally until the user says I give up you're just too smart for me

That sounds like a good way to start. Begin with something simple and work up from there.

You may want to have a simple menu based system at first, which just returns info from the predefined list and then try to implement a search function on top of that. So you'd have your predefined list, but then the user could enter a certain word and you'd get back all the results with that word. From there you can work on phasing out the list and instead relying on the search query, where you'd return results based on confidence level.

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