21-Intelligent-Chatbot-in-Python-Using-the-spaCy-NLP-Library
How To Create an Intelligent Chatbot in Python Using the spaCy NLP Library
How to build your own chatbot using a library like spaCy, which is a fast and robust Python-based natural language processing (NLP) library.
Prerequisites
A. Set-up environments.
Python 3 installed and a programming environment set up. You can complete this for your machine with our previous repo tutorials:
B. Get an API key for OpenWeather.
Visit the OpenWeather website to create an account.
https://home.openweathermap.org/users/sign_up
After registering successfully, visit the API keys page to view the API key automatically created for your account. This key should be an alphanumeric sequence of characters.
Step 1 — Setting Up Your Environment
Make sure you are in the directory where you set up your environment and then run the following command:
source my_env_weather/bin/activate
Now install spaCy:
pip install -U spacy
Finally, you will download a language model. spaCy’s language models are pre-trained NLP models that you can use to process statements to extract meaning. You’ll be working with the English language model, so you’ll download that.
Run the following command:
python -m spacy download en_core_web_md
If you run into an error like the following:
Output
ERROR: Failed building wheel for en-core-web-md
You need to install wheel:
pip install -U wheel
Then download the English-language model again.
To confirm that you have spaCy installed properly, open the Python interpreter:
python
Next, import spaCy and load the English-language model:
>>> import spacy
>>> nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_md")
If those two statements execute without any errors, then you have spaCy installed.
Now close the Python interpreter:
>>> exit()
You now have everything needed to begin working on the chatbot. In the next section, you’ll create a script to query the OpenWeather API for the current weather in a city.