Chatbot not understanding registered phrases

Question

I’m developing a Chatbot called "Joker" for use in a Telegram group. The Bot must respond only if its name (Joker) is quoted in a sentence, otherwise it must remain "silent" without interfering with the group’s conversation. However, he "wakes up" and responds with a null value, "None" to any message sent to the group. With the word Joker contained in the phrase, the Bot is not understanding the predefined questions, registered in your training and answers with one of the standard answers to questions not yet learned.

• User: Good morning, you guys!
• Bot: None
• User: Good morning, Joker
• Bot: I’m sorry, I didn’t get your message.

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))

Answer 1

This code should remove 'Joker' from the message to be parsed.

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

    mensagem_sem_joker = re.sub(r'\bjoker\b', '', message, flags=re.IGNORECASE)
    # remove espaços duplicados
    mensagem_sem_joker = re.sub(r'\s{2,}', ' ', mensagem_sem_joker)

    if joker_na_mensagem and len(message) > 50 and self.watson_usage:
        top_answer = get_analysis(mensagem_sem_joker)
        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(mensagem_sem_joker))

As for the answer None, you need to edit your code so that if the function respond return None, you do not pass this value to the user, because the None means there is no response to that message, probably because it was not directed to the bot.

Since I don’t have access to the rest of the code, I can’t fix this for you.

---

Edit

In the code you provided via Dropbox, there is the following snippet in the file bot/application.py:

def text_message(self, bot, update):
    self.send_type_action(bot, update)

    if not self.check_for_emotion(update):
        message = update.effective_message.text
        update.effective_message.reply_text(
            str(self.comm.respond(message))
        )
    return 0

I believe this is the reason why the bot is responding to messages with None. This code snippet is calling update.effective_message.reply_text regardless of what was returned by the function respond.

To fix this, replace the whole above with the following code:

def text_message(self, bot, update):
    self.send_type_action(bot, update)

    if not self.check_for_emotion(update):
        message = update.effective_message.text
        resposta = self.comm.respond(message)
        if resposta:
            update.effective_message.reply_text(resposta)
    return 0

What this code does, is to check if the function respond returned something. If yes, call the function reply_text with the result.
As the function respond only returns string or None, the conversion of types made by str is unnecessary and has been removed.

Note: I realized that you were copying wrong. Therefore, the syntax errors.
The structure of a python function is the way I wrote it. Never align the body of a function to its first line.