HelpBot

Introduction

HelpBot is a primitive chatbot designed to answer technical questions in Facebook chats. All packages used are listed in the respective requirements.txt file.

Installation

To install HelpBot, one must simply use the Python Package Manager, pip as shown below. Warning: this code has only been tested using python 2. Porting to python 3 should be trivial if need be.

pip install -r requirements.txt
# Alternative commands (only need to run one) are listed below
sudo pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install --user requirements.txt

Note: this code has been tested using virtualenv.

Configuration

A .env file is required to configure this project. An example of how to make a .env file for this program is listed below

Example of how to make a .env in cmd/terminal of your computer

# Linux/Max: note you may use any text editor of your preference to
# make the file named .env in the directory as the program
touch .env
nano .env
# Windows
notepad.exe .env

Example file written using favorite text editor

FB_USER=<your facebook email>
FB_PASSWORD=<your facebook password>
# This bottom value is optional, makes script startup time on avergae faster
PICKLE_FILENAME=classifier_pickle

TODOS

Make code forward compatible with Python 3
Add robust handlers when classifying text of different casing
Improve classification model and build data sets directly from Stack Overflow
Look into tfidf, tnse, and ngrams
May consider an actual nn for this

Troubleshooting

In case of error 'InsecurePlatformWarning: A true SSLContext object is not available.', run the following command

pip install requests[security]

Source for troubleshooting tip: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29134512/insecureplatformwarning-a-true-sslcontext-object-is-not-available-this-prevent