Build a bot in Python in a couple of minutes.
There are two steps, create a bot itself and deploy it. To start you should prepare your Python environment. There are many easy ways to start and great materials to read online and I plan to review some of them in this short text. There are three stages: simple Twitter bots with no real user interaction, NLTK bots which can converse vaguely, deep learning bots which tend to be used in commercial applications — think customer service.
First of all you can try experiment with Twitter bots who like, follow, retweet certain posts. Twitter REST API is really easy to use and you’ll find plenty of material online. Have a look here for a great guide on how to make your first Twitter bot.
Next step is do a real conversational bot, who would talk with an user. For example this one shows you how to build a bot in Python on Discord, but this is more involved to set up.
The best way to start would be build a bot using NLTK, one of the most popular natural language processing libraries in Python. Have a look here for a great guild on how to do it. There’s another guide about NLTK chatbots here. Yes, Medium is a great way to start reading about building a chatbot.
The next step would be spicing up our chatbots with some deep learning.
The first choice would be to use some seq2seq (word2vec) methods. This text explains it.
Another possibility is to use RNNs to make a conversation. Bot is guessing what to answer by inferring from previous words. Have a look here for an intro to RNNs. Also this text is a pretty complete summary of how you can use RNNs, seq2seq and LSTMs to build a bot.
Now the most advanced bots are those using recent generative models like GPT-2 or BERT. Have a look here to read more about this project.
Concluding, you can create your own bot from scratch in only a few minutes or spend hours, weeks or months doing so, depending on how deep you want to go.
There are many different ways to go about with building a bot from scratch, you can download simple software packages, you can purchase tools, or you can collaborate with other teams.
Besides the hundreds of tutorials available. If you get stuck, and need help, just start asking questions on Quora, Reddit or StackOverflow.
