BonBot
BonBot is a chatbot that aims to have highly engaging & empathetic conversations with its users so as to provide them an outlet where they can express their emotions and thoughts while being anonymous
Created on 31st October 2020
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BonBot
BonBot is a chatbot that aims to have highly engaging & empathetic conversations with its users so as to provide them an outlet where they can express their emotions and thoughts while being anonymous
The problem BonBot solves
Many a time, people find it difficult to open up about their emotions or thoughts due to the fear of being judged by people around them. This causes them to bottle everything up ultimately giving them more and more stress and anxiety.
Studies have shown that even talking about your thoughts and emotions helps a person to better structure what they are experiencing, allowing them to rationalize and understand themselves better.
Here is where BonBot comes in. BonBot is an AI mental health support chatbot powered by NLP that can maintain an empathetic and engaging conversation with its user while also listening to all that they have to say. We chose the name BonBot for our chatbot since the word "Bot" in french means positive.
The application is mainly focused toward those who are feeling low and find it uncomfortable to talk about themselves as the bot may be able to better their mood while also decreasing the users stress and anxiety
BonBot is no substitute for a doctor, however it can act as a non judgemental friend who is ready to hear you out at any time.
Challenges we ran into
One of the first problems we faced was finding a dataset that could match our needs in a specific format that would be optimum for our bot such as finding the root of a word and so on. Since we couldn't find one, we were forced to create a custom one ourselves by taking other datasets as reference.
We also faced some issues while creating the application especially while using the material UI library and while calling the API created by flask. But in the end we were able to fix some issues and find alternative solutions for others.
Since we had to implement the python code with the react application we had to go through flask which was something that none of us on the team had worked on before. But luckily after hours of work we were finally able to execute the local api calls to the react application and get the bot working
All in all this hackathon has been a great learning experience for us and we were happy to be a part of inGenuis 2020.