Chatbot respond only when a specific word is contained in the sentence

Question

I’m creating a Chatbot in Telegram that can answer questions from group users. The bot needs a keyword to start chatting. That word would be his name, "Joker". Thus, only when the word Joker is mentioned in a sentence would it begin to interact with the users of the group or when a response is forwarded to it. Using Python 3.7.4.

Example:

• User: I think the Joker knows more about this
• Bot: What subject?
• User: About the seal killing in the backlands of Ceará, Joker.
• Bot: What are you talking about?

But I have no idea how to implement this action.

def respond(self, message):
    """
   Receive message from user and returns corresponding answer.
   """
    if len(message) > 50 and self.watson_usage:
        top_answer = get_analysis(message)
        return f"Hmm, você está falando sobre {top_answer}"
    elif re.search("Joker", message) or len(message) > 0:
        return self.comm.get_response(self.clean(message))
    else:
        return "Algo de errado não está certo"\
               " Digite /info para saber mais."

Answer 1

What I notice in your code is that the first condition does not check if there is "Joker" in the message. I assume he’s always tinkering "Hm, you’re talking about ..."

To correct this only, change the first condition to:

if 'Joker' in message and len(message) > 50 and self.watson_usage:

If you don’t understand Python, the condition checks:

1. If 'Joker' is in the message
2. If the message contains more than 50 characters
3. (I presume) if you exceeded your quota of IBM Watson

---

The way it is, Joker needs to have the first capital letter to fire the code. I suppose the ideal would be for it to respond to any combination of lowercase and uppercase.

In this case, this is the code:

def respond(self, message):
    """
    Receive message from user and returns corresponding answer.
    """
    if re.search("joker", message, re.IGNORECASE):
        joker_na_mensagem = True
    else:
        joker_na_mensagem = False

    if joker_na_mensagem and len(message) > 50 and self.watson_usage:
        top_answer = get_analysis(message)
        return f"Hmm, você está falando sobre {top_answer}"
    elif joker_na_mensagem and len(message.strip()) == len('joker'):
        return "Algo de errado não está certo. Digite /info para saber mais."
    elif joker_na_mensagem:
        return self.comm.get_response(self.clean(message))

Edit 1: I changed the second condition, where (I assume) the bot would respond to any message that had more than 0 characters, regardless of being mentioned. I deleted the character requirement, because if 'Joker' is in the message, it means that it is greater than 0 characters.

Edit 2: I changed the last condition. Now, the function only returns the error message if someone mentions the bot and says nothing else. That is to say:

User: Joker
Bot: Something is not right [...]

Edit 3: changes the order of the conditions, because the second condition nullified the third.