Here’s how one person can make you an expert at any topic
Ok, maybe that’s a bit misleading. It’s not a person, but rather a chat bot. If you started reading this article, it’s likely you have something else on your mind: learning or studying. Whether it be for school or university, to further your career, or even just feed your curiosity, let’s face it, everyone is constantly using the web to gain knowledge.
And it seems simple to just say “look it up” or “figure it out with Google”, but the reality is, learning resources can be bad for a couple reasons:
- ❌ The sources might not be helpful
- ❌ The source might be inaccurate
- ❌ Resources for your specific problems/questions may be hard to find
It’s no question that there are over 1 billion different articles, podcasts, books, journals, and more. So the question is:
With so many resources, how do we find good resources, and learn as efficiently as possible?
The Answer: KnowledgeBot.ai 💬
Long story short, when it comes to learning, this bot is your best friend. But for context, what is KnowledgeBot.ai?
- A Chatbot on Facebook Messenger(Any Platform can use it)
- Get subject specific information: Just have a conversation!
- In-depth learning, using the World Wide Web to offer a reliable and precise learning experience
But seeing is believing right? Check this out, I asked the bot a question about a certain historical event, and here is how it handled it:
What you have the power to do 💪
- 🔍Scrape the web for specific articles and resources in less than 10 seconds
- 📜Give the chatbot instruction through a text message conversation
- 👆Click on whether the feedback is helpful or not to give the bot more insights
And this is 🔑: Provide further research materials for more related topics. Think about it, you not only find answers to your questions, but you can infinitely expand your depth on a topic just using this chatbot.
Inside the Black Box ⬛️
Some quick information on how I built the chatbot:
First, I created a webhook to manage the user activity on Facebook messenger, and then create a http GET request to get that information, and POST a response. In simple terms, I made an experience that takes what you say in the chat and does other things with it.
Some library and API information about what resources I used in my project:
- I used Node.js as a backend for the application
- I used Heroku to server host the webhook
- I used the following server npm packages: request, express, body_parser, axios, and node_wit
But unless development’s your thing, that might not be very interesting.
The Interesting Stuff
Let’s start from the beginning. You input a string of text to that chatbot through messenger, such as, “How do you find the derivative of the function?”.
That input is POSTED to the messenger application. Then, a Natural Language Processor(NLP) API called wit.ai uses machine learning to extract important words and phrases from your sentence. In this case, it would extract the phrases “Find”, “Derivative”, “of”, and “function”.
Next, the wit.ai NLP uses machine learning to interpret the intent of the sentence(a command or for learning).
Command
A command would be something like “Can we review this information?” or “Can we look over that?”. As you can see, this way the bot can be instructed to do things like create study guides from the generated information that you had throughout the conversation.
Learning
Learning is an intent where wit.ai interprets your sentence as something you want to learn. For example, we want to learn how to find derivatives, so it will continue the to the web search. But this is no ordinary google search, and here’s why…
- First, a Thesaurus API will be used. By finding similar words, we can add more parameters to the search result, and therefore give more insights and get more accurate articles.
- Next, the Thesaurus Synonyms will be added to the extracted phases, such that when inputted to search, the efficiency will allow for specific educational resources to be found.
- Now, a Search Engine Result Page(SERP) API will be used. By inputting the strings into the SERP API, we can obtain accurate articles straight from the web, as well as similar topics to research.
Finally, those articles suggestions and other research topics are sent as a POST request to the messenger app, so you can see those suggestions sent as a message.
Additionally, there is an option to select whether the feedback is helpful or not. This way the bot can better optimize the search results as it can collect feedback data and train on it.
🔑Takeaways
- KnowledgeBot.ai is a better way to learn and find resources
- It’s accessible on all devices through Facebook Messenger
- It uses wit.ai’s NLP to figure out main research points from your messages
- It devises a better search request using a similar words
- It gets the web results using a SERP API
What’s Next?
Here are some implementations coming in the future for KnowledgeBot.ai:
- Voice Recognition/Translation
- More resources/subject based dictionaries
- Better and more accurate web results + classification
- Image recognition to analyze content
- Add a teacher mode → Allowing specific research on specific subjects
- Add a study guide printer based on the commands(convert conversation to a text file)
About
This chatbot was created as a project for the Facebook 2020 AI Hackathon. Check out the full project here!
My name is Ankit Nakhawa, I’m a 15 year old passionate about BCIs and AI. If you want to ask a question, talk to me about this article, or anything else, you can contact me at ankitnakhawa@gmail.com, or on LinkedIn, I’d love to hear from you!
Feel free to check out some of my other articles!
