SwansonBot

Intention

This chatbot is based off the Parks and Recreation character, Ron Swanson. I wanted this chatbot to have a distinct personality so he should come off as a little gruff and grumpy. You can ask SwansonBot questions about himself, his hobbies, his preference in food and drink, and for some anti-government jokes. He is not going to be thrilled that you are talking to him but will try to respond accordingly.

Context

I wanted to stay true to character so it was important for the responses to seem curt and slightly irritated. Since SwansonBot is a pretty simple chatbot, it made sense to insist on concise and short questions, which also correlated well with Ron Swanson's rule of using as few words as possible.

Process

I actually decided to do a Ron Swanson chatbot after seeing the API available on Github and then started to form which questions to ask based around the character's interests. Ron really enjoys meat, whiskey, and anti-government jokes, which I incorporated. I also wanted to include a steak recipe because it's important to him that other people indulge in meat as much as possible.

Product

The SwansonBot utilizes 3 API's: Giphy, Food2Fork, and Ron Swanson Quotes.

Live Heroku Link: https://desolate-springs-17896.herokuapp.com/about

Video: https://vimeo.com/291427449

Reflection

I feel like the tone and personality of the chatbot was the most important for me to pin down. I wanted the chatbot to be immediately recognizable for his curt and blunt tone. I had a hard time implementing Food2Fork but eventually ended up being able to show a recipe based off the food search term that I inputted. Next time, I would try to make the flow of dialogue even more fluid and implement more actions that the user could do. See below for some example screenshots of the conversation.