The Rob Bot project is a chat bot, specifically written to be of assistance for me and my college mates.
The initial purpose was to inform us in the chat every morning which classroom we were seated in for the day. However this quickly opened up my eyes as to just how much the bot could actually do for us. Reminders, automatic messages on schedule, scraping the lunch menu site, Google Custom Search integration etcetera.
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Integration with the TimeEdit server used by our college
This integration allows the bot to subscribe to the schedule for our class. It allows the bot to automatically inform students of which classroom is being used each morning, or any time during the day. It also returns the schedule as far in the future as is allowed by the Discord char limit of 2000 chars.
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Integration with Google Custom Search Engine
This feature allows the bot to answer virtually any question. If the bot recognizes a message as a question for this integration, a JSON response from CSE is parsed and returned in chat.
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Integration with Reddit
This feature is just for fun. At the time of writing, the bot uses this integration to fetch random jokes from r/jokes and r/ProgrammerHumor when asked in chat.
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Integration with a custom web scraper
This feature answers the question "What's on the menu for today?" and similar queries. It scrapes the lunch menu for the local cafeteria on campus, yielding the menu for today.
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Corona data
Due to the alarming development of the COVID19 virus, a feature was implemented using a free API listed below, for retrieving data about the infections, mortalities and recoveries around the world.
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Ranking
Rank one another up or down, just for goofing around really.
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Help and Presentation queues for teachers and students
In the wake of a pandemic, all of us are working and studying from home. This poses new challenges for teachers and students, where something as simple as asking for help after class is hard to deliver in a just manner. People call and text the teacher, and the loudest one usually triumphs. It's also hard for the teacher to remember who asked for help first. The Help queue feature, now also with presentations, allows students to sign up to a queue which the chatbot manages, and the teacher to pop it with simple commands. This ensures just and easy help lists which is great both for the teacher and the
students.
This project would not have been possible if it were not for these 3rd party libraries which are hereby mentioned with the utmost gratitude:
- google-api-python-client (Apache License 2.0) https://github.com/googleapis/google-api-python-client
- BeautifulSoup4 (MIT License) https://pypi.org/project/beautifulsoup4/
- discord.py (MIT License) https://github.com/Rapptz/discord.py
- praw (BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License) https://github.com/praw-dev/praw
- ics (Apache License 2.0) https://pypi.org/project/ics/
- coronavirus-monitor https://rapidapi.com/astsiatsko/api/coronavirus-monitor
Do you want to contribute to this project? Want one of these bots for your college class? Clone and send a PR or email me at dotchetter@protonmail.ch to get in touch.