Inspiration
Have you ever been overwhelmed by the choices available on Netflix? Or perhaps you simply want a recommendation tailored to your tastes? Meet Bot and Chill! You can message Bot and Chill like any of your friends, except it knows WAY more about movies than they do! We were inspired to make this bot because searching for movie recommendations is tedious and yet an all-too-common occurrence. Rather than opening a browser and contemplating your options for half an hour, why not have an interface that you can talk to as if you were hitting up your friend? You don’t even have to leave Messenger!
What it does
Bot and Chill asks the user for their favorite movie (or any movie they like). After the user replies (e.g. “American Psycho”), Bot and Chill will respond with the titles of five movies that the user will enjoy based on their input. We chose to limit this to five, because this helps combat analysis paralysis.
How I built it
Bot and Chill was built upon the Messenger chatbot API infused with machine learning from training on Wit.ai. We set up a Heroku server to host our files and wrote functions using The Movie Database API.
Challenges I ran into
The biggest challenge for this project was figuring out how to train the bot so that it does not behave like a simple function tree. To do this we used wit.ai which is a challenging api and given the time constraints it was hard to figure it out completely and make the bot learn to speak intelligently. Also this was the first hackathon experience for most of the team members and only one of us had experience with javascript or chatbots before. And given how this project is heavily dependent on node.js, learning the syntax and working it out in a time crunch was another hurdle that we faced.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Making a chatbot. None of us had Javascript experience (except for one) and no one had made anything related to chatbots before. We are so happy that we managed to make a functioning bot! (Even if it’s a little buggy)
What I learned
NodeJS Messenger API Wit.AI TMBD API Javascript Heroku CLI
What's next for Bot and Chill
We want to train the bot more using wit.ai because right now it is very basic. We also want to add more features to it such as analyzing emotions and suggesting movies based on that.
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