Adventures with Raspberry Pi - Part 3

Continuing from the previous post, lets now build a Chatbot on the Raspberry Pi. If we have some digital media such as music, movies etc. stored in a media server on the Pi, these can be accessed using a Chatbot too.

I have used Telegram to build the bot. The Telegram app is available for all platforms - iOS, Android, Web etc. Using the funnily named BotFather from Telegram, anyone can create a Bot account.

Once the account is created, the "brain" of the Chatbot needs to be implemented using a programming language and framework. I have use the python based chatterbot framework to create a bot called - Frasier (named after the TV Series). The bot in turn interacts with the Plex Media Server API's to search and download the requested media such as a song, TV show or a movie. Telegram currently allows files up to 1.5 GB to be shared via the app.

Telegram App in an iPhone requesting a song from a Chatbot running on a Raspberry Pi

In the screenshot above, the chats in Blue are my commands and in Gray are the responses from the Chatbot.

Requesting for digital content is just one of the examples. One could build additional commands such as "/weather" to know the weather, "/stocks" to know about shares, "/news" to download news articles etc. Of course, for each such command, some API from underlying services such as Weather Underground, Yahoo Finance, News Sites would have to be integrated into the Chatbot.

Have fun building your own Chatbots in the Raspberry Pi!
Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

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