I’m relatively new to programming and a recent project I’ve started to work on is a chatbot in python for an irc channel I frequent.
One of my goals is to have the bot able to very basically keep track of conversations it is having with users.
I presently an using conversation objects. When a user addresses the bot, it creates a new convo object and stores a log of the conversation, the current topic, etc. in that object.
When the user speaks, if their message matches the topic of the conversation, it chooses a response based on what they’ve said and the new topic.
For example, if the bot joins, and a user says: “Hello, bot.” the conversation will be created and the topic set to “greeting”.
the bot will say hello back and if the user asks: “What’s up?”, the bot will change the topic to “currentevents”, and reply with “not much” or similar.
topic have related topic, and if the bot notices a sudden change to a topic not marked as related (questions are exceptions), it will act slightly confused and taken aback.
My question is though: I feel like my method is a bit overly complicated and unnecessary. I’m sure objects aren’t the best thing to use. What would be another approach to keeping track of a conversation and it’s topic? Be it a better way or worse, I’m just looking for ideas and a little brainstorming.
Before you say this isn’t the right place, I’ve tried asking on programmers.stackexchange.com, but I didn’t receive a relevant response, just someone who misunderstood me. I’m hoping I can get some more feedback on a more active site. In a way this is code help 🙂
Here’s the code for my current approach. There are still a few bugs and I’m sure the code is far from efficient. Any tips or help on the code is welcomed.
def __init__(slef):
self.dicti_topics = {"None":["welcomed", "ask", "badbot", "leave"],
"welcomed":["welcomed", "howare", "badbot", "ask", "leave"],
"howare":["greetfinished", "badbot", "leave"]}
self.dicti_lines = {"hello":"welcomed", "howareyou":"howare", "goaway":"leave", "you'rebad":"badbot", "question":"asked"}
self.dicti_responce = dicti["Arriving dicti_responce"]
def do_actions(self):
if len(noi.recv) > 0:
line = False
##set vars
item = noi.recv.pop(0)
#update and trim lastrecv list
noi.lastrecv.append(item)
if len(noi.lastrecv) > 10: noi.lastrecv = noi.lastrecv[1:10]
args = item.split()
channel, user = args[0], args[1].split("!")[0]
message = " ".join(w for w in args[2:])
print "channel:", channel
print "User:", user
print "Message:", message
if re.match("noi", message):
if not user in noi.convos.keys():
noi.convos[user] = []
if not noi.convos[user]:
noi.convos[user] = Conversation(user)
noi.convos[user].channel = channel
line = "What?"
send(channel, line)
if re.match("hello|yo|hey|ohai|ello|howdy|hi", message) and (noi.jointime - time.time() < 20):
print "hello convo created"
if not user in noi.convos.keys():
noi.convos[user] = []
if not noi.convos[user]:
noi.convos[user] = Conversation(user, "welcomed")
noi.convos[user].channel = channel
#if user has an active convo
if user in noi.convos.keys():
##setvars
line = None
convo = noi.convos[user]
topic = convo.topic
#remove punctuation, "noi", and make lowercase
rmsg = message.lower()
for c in [".", ",", "?", "!", ";"]:
rmsg = rmsg.replace(c, "")
#print rmsg
rlist = rmsg.split("noi")
for rmsg in rlist:
rmsg.strip(" ")
#categorize message
if rmsg in ["hello", "yo", "hey", "ohai", "ello", "howdy", "hi"]: rmsg = "hello"
if rmsg in ["how do you do", "how are you", "sup", "what's up"]: rmsg = "howareyou"
if rmsg in ["gtfo", "go away", "shooo", "please leave", "leave"]: rmsg = "goaway"
if rmsg in ["you're bad", "bad bot", "stfu", "stupid bot"]: rmsg = "you'rebad"
#if rmsg in []: rmsg =
#if rmsg in []: rmsg =
#Question handling
r = r'(when|what|who|where|how) (are|is) (.*)'
m = re.match(r, rmsg)
if m:
rmsg = "question"
responce = "I don't know %s %s %s." % (m.group(1), m.group(3), m.group(2))
#dicti_lines -> {message: new_topic}
#if msg has an entry, get the new associated topic
if rmsg in self.dicti_lines.keys():
new_topic = self.dicti_lines[rmsg]
#dicti_topics
relatedtopics = self.dicti_topics[topic]
#if the topic is related, change topic
if new_topic in relatedtopics:
convo.change_topic(new_topic)
noi.convos[user] = convo
#and respond
if new_topic == "leave": line = random.choice(dicti["Confirm"])
if rmsg == "question": line = responce
else: line = random.choice(self.dicti_responce[new_topic])
#otherwise it's confused
else:
line = "Huh?"
if line:
line = line+", %s." % user
send(channel, line)
This is the do_action of a state in a state machine.
having clear goals is important in programming even before you set out deciding what objects and how. Unfortunately from what I’ve read above this isn’t really clear.
So first forget the how of the program. forget about the objects, the code and what they do.
Now Imagine someone else was going to write for you the program. someone who is such a good programmer, they don’t need you do tell them how to code. here are some questions they might ask you.
Having done this then forget about your convo object or whatever and think in terms of 1, 2 and 4. On Pen and paper think about the main elements of your problems i,e Conversations.Don’t Just create Objects… you’ll find them.
Now think about the relationships of those elements in terms of how they interact. i.e.
“Bot adds message to Topic, User adds message to Topic, messages from Topic are sent to Log.”
this will help you find what the objects are, what they must do and what information they’ll need to store.
Having said all that, I would say your biggest problem is your taking on more than you can chew. To begin with, for a computer to recognise words and put them into topics is quite complicated and involves linguistics and/or statistics. As a new programmer I’d tend to avoid these areas because they will simply let you down and in the process kill your motivation. start small… then go BIG. try messing with GUI programming, then make a simple calculator and stuff…