Developing a F-Droid app to talk to my Java Chatbot

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People,

I have only just discovered F-Droid and I am very enthusiastic about the system and it just occurred to me that it might be the right environment for me to find someone to help me with developing an app to talk to my Chatbot running on my server. Currently it can be talked to via FB Messenger (testing the chatbot was the ONLY reason I set up the account!) but I want to get away from that eventually - preferably sooner rather than later:

I think an app should be relatively straight forward to develop but I have never built an Android app before so it would be good to find someone who knew what they were doing and who wanted to collaborate. At the moment Phi Rho is a general-purpose chatbot but I am going to start customising canned responses for him so he can act for me when I am not available when people want information about my non-profit organisations:

http://cryonics.org.au

and:

Eventually I would like to add some real AGI modules to Phi Rho so he would become a real Avatar - but that is a bit in the future . .

The chatbot code itself is closed-source (the guy I bought the licence from has long-since stopped responded to my emails) but the Android app would definitely be Open Source. In fact, it is probably worth another email to the author to see if he could be talked into letting me open source the chatbot itself. The chatbot is written in Java (which I know very little about) and I did look into trying to learn Kotlin so I might be able to start doing small changes / enhancements but I haven’t made much progress with that idea so far.

Anyway, I don’t know if it is appropriate netiquette to bring up this idea here - sorry if it isn’t . . but I thought the smart developers here might have some good comments / feedback on the idea.

Thanks,
Phil.

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Hi, Phil.

That’s an interesting idea and may have really creative continuations.

I’m quite sure I don’t see the whole picture but have some ideas I want to share with you.

Having a chat bot service doesn’t really mean you miss a client. You could think of integrating your bot into a network that already has servers and clients ready-made. The best one I know of is Matrix network and Riot client. Then you simply need to use Matrix API for bots and that’s it: you have it all.

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@Ildar ,

Thanks for responding!

I had a look at Matrix and it is interesting but I probably didn’t explain myself well - when I said “when I am not available” I meant sleeping, or otherwise unable to respond. Usually if someone is trying to ring me about getting a relative frozen, it is usually urgent - they need information in a hurry and they don’t want to read web pages. I would like an Avatar to calmly give them the basic information so they can do what they need to do themselves until I come on line again. There really isn’t any other option - we don’t have the resources to have 24x7 phone support . . I am it - and the only option as far as I can see is to get some “intelligent” non-human support . .

Regards,
Phil.

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@Ildar

  • I think I see what you were getting at - I will continue investigating . .
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You might want to look into opsdroid for your backend. It has a Matrix connector (among others), should you decide to go that route.

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@Coffee ,

Thanks! I will check it out . .

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