World’s first extra supportive bot
I gave life to a Twitter bot that you should check out.
👉 https://twitter.com/extrasupportive
When you follow Extra Supportive, it follows you back and will like your tweets and reply with encouraging, supportive messages.
Why
I made Extra Supportive in response to how weird Twitter can be.
On one hand, Twitter can be super isolating and it can feel like you’re talking to yourself.
On the other hand, Twitter is gaining a reputation for being unable to control hateful and offensive user behavior ☹️
So what about a bot that just “hearts” your tweets and always replies with a positive note?
Bots, Natural Language Processing & Generation
NLP and NLG are major areas of research and there are some useful strides being made.
I remember when I had my first conversation with a chatbot on AIM.
It was with SmarterChild.
It probably looked something like this:
It got boring pretty fast even as the developers integrated a lot of services like news and movie times.
But don’t get me wrong, I still think SmarterChild was cool.
Bots are still cool.
But I still don’t think anyone is having a rich conversation with them despite all the resources going into making them better.
One simple insight
A good chatbot doesn’t talk much, but it listens a lot.
A good chatbot encourages users to share, open up, and explore a conversation with themselves.
Extra Supportive encourages you to tweet but doesn’t insist on you interacting with it.
And because Extra Supportive does one thing, I’ve found its replies are usually pretty spot on! ✨🏆🥇
Actually, there is not a lot going on under the hood!
Extra Supportive has access to a little sentiment analysis and beyond that a list of responses to choose from.
For a project I was able to compete in a weekend, I was pretty happy with how Extra Supportive turned out.
Also, I’ve been delighted at the positive reaction Extra Supportive has garnered.
I felt humbled when Stevie mentioned Extra Supportive to Lil B!
Lil B is a famous rapper who has a reputation as an evangelist of positive thinking and tolerance.
Credits
I’d like to thank Glitch for being such a fun but also useful tool for coding & hosting web projects.
More to come
I am producing small tech projects and sharing them with my friends.
- Follow me here and/or on Twitter to stay connected.
- And don’t forget to follow Extra Supportive!
✌️
