Inspiration

After taking a machine learning course hosted by Stanford alumnus, I felt inspired to use my knowledge to develop something that will help me and others withstand boredom. I use discord (a messaging platform) a lot so I decided to make a discord chat bot using the discord API.

What it does

The chat bot’s name is Daisy. You can talk to her about general things such as asking her how she’s doing, what she’s doing, what she likes etc. The bot also has some additional features through which a user can suggest a possible conversation that could be added to the training set. The suggestion must first be approved by me before it can be added to the training set. The more suggestions one gives, the more coins that person gets. The person can use those coins to buy fun things from the bot such as virtual fortune cookies and pizzas.

How I built it

The entire program was made using python. I used the numpy and the nltk module (Natural Language Toolkit) for preprocessing data by lemmatizing words. Keras, another python module, was used for the models while pickle was used to store and reuse models. I used a 3 layer sequential neural network as the model for my machine learning algorithm. The discord.py API was used to create the user interface for this bot.

What I learned

I learnt some basic programming concepts of neural networks and learnt how to implement my knowledge using Keras. I also got a better sense of reading documentation as I worked with the discord.py API.