YashBot

A conversational chat utility bot for Discord, built in 2017 to 2018. It uses wit.ai for natural-language understanding, well before mainstream LLM assistants existed.

Instead of fixed command parsing, YashBot sends free-text queries to wit.ai, reads back the recognised intents and their confidence scores, and routes each query to the right backend to fulfil it.

How it works

The !ask command is the core of the bot:

1. The user's message is sent to wit.ai via the node-wit SDK.
2. wit.ai returns a set of entities (intents) with confidence scores.
3. The bot checks entities against confidence thresholds and routes to a matching handler.
4. If no intent clears its threshold, the bot falls back to a "did not understand" response.

Recognised intents and their backends:

Intent	Backend / behaviour
Math expressions and rounding	mathjs evaluation
Weather	OpenWeatherMap, plus Google Time Zone API for local sunrise/sunset, output in K, C and F
Factual "who/what is" questions	Wikipedia API (search then extract)
Computational queries	Wolfram Alpha
GIF search	Giphy API
Meme search	Google Custom Search (with a few hardcoded classics)
Greetings, farewells, small talk	Canned responses

Commands

• !ping - Checks connection latency to chat and the API.
• !ask <query> - Sends a natural-language query to wit.ai. Examples:
  • !ask 57*21 or !ask round 15.4545 (math)
  • !ask weather sydney (weather)
  • !ask who is Ada Lovelace (Wikipedia)
  • !ask cat gif (Giphy)
• !say <text> - Echoes the text and removes the original command message.
• !clearchat <n> - Deletes the last n messages. Requires the Admin role.
• !help - Lists available commands.

Tech stack

Node.js, discord.js, node-wit (wit.ai), mathjs, wolfram, and the Giphy, OpenWeatherMap, Google Time Zone, Google Custom Search and Wikipedia APIs.

Setup

1. Install dependencies:

   npm install
   

2. Provide credentials. The bot reads from a local config.json if present, otherwise from environment variables:

   discordKey
   witKey
   wolframKey
   giphyKey
   youtubeKey
   

   The weather, time zone and image-search integrations also require their own API keys. Supply all keys through config.json or environment variables. Do not commit real keys to the repository.

3. Run the bot:

   npm start
   

Note

This is an early personal project from 2017 to 2018. It predates modern LLM chat assistants and was an experiment in intent-based conversational routing using the tools available at the time.

License

MIT