I’ve really been hitting my strides with the Winspire chatbot, since I figured out how to implement minor AI elements so that the bot can respond to any prompt with specific keywords. Now, whether someone asks ‘hey, can I get some music bruh?’ or ‘I would like to know if there is a music selection you provide?,’ the bot will be able to discern the intent behind the question and offer a proper response. I still have some work to complete around this, since I have to fill out the entire scope of possibilities in terms of how someone might ask for music or memes or articles on productivity or just general advice, since ‘music,’ ‘Music’ and ‘music?’ are all different keywords for instance and inputting one might not trigger a response depending on what’s been typed and whether or not the bot is actually programmed to respond. In other words, if someone asks “hey, can I get a motivating article” or “hey, can I get a motivating article?’ a response might not generate if I didn’t input the keywords ‘article’ and ‘article?’ separately.

                  On another note, I’ve also been working on making the bot more visual and ‘organic’ feeling in terms of the responses that it generates. For instance, sometimes it types out a paragraph and sometimes it types out a few words response, depending on the context of the discussion. Moreover, I’ve set the timing of how long it takes the chatbot to ‘type’ a response to differ based on the length of a message – naturally, a paragraph shouldn’t take half the speed of an ‘LOL’ to pop up on messenger. I’ve realized that timing and diversity in speech are both critical elements of making the conversation feel more ‘real,’ which is of course more work for me to do manually, but definitely contributes to the overall experience.

                  Moving forward, I want to look into what apps are available to link to, since I want to plug in a few Spotify playlists and perhaps start creating a higher level ecosystem of functions assuming they fit the mold of what I’m creating. I still haven’t been able to figure out how to time someone’s online status to shoot them a message if they’ve exceed 10-20 minutes on Messenger, so for now I’m creating a quick prompt that will shoot out a few times throughout the day to ask people if they’re working while I figure out a workaround to requiring manual input from the user (as that might be more distracting than actually helpful).