After a frustrating afternoon, I finally made a personal breakthrough.

I built a bit of bot!

I tried building a chatbot from scratch on my own using DIY blog posts as guides, but it was too hard because I don’t have programming knowledge, and those instructions start with setting up a server, when I was raring to have a go at building the bot itself.

So after hours of trying today, I decided to take a different approach and take a shot at using a chatbot toolkit. I chose to use wit.ai as it was recommended by a friend, and also the fact that Facebook bought it.

Following instructions from the wit.ai starter guide, I managed to write a simple yes-no response. On top of that, I also “trained” the bot to respond to variations of yes/no, such as “yeah”, “yup”, “nope”; similar to how a person might respond over WhatsApp or FB Messenger. This is the most basic of basics, but looking at where I started just a few weeks ago, with my fears and concerns, this is really a leap forward.

So here it is, a screencast of my efforts today: