New Series: Building a Chatbot

Nina Cialone shares her journey as she builds a chatbot for Lehigh University's student-run publication, The Brown and White - with no coding background! Follow along as she documents the process.

Photo Source: NordVPN

My name is Nina Cialone, and I’m entering my senior year at Lehigh University, where I’m pursuing an undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science. I’ve also had the pleasure of writing a few pieces for this newsletter on the creator economy and the growth of artificial intelligence!

This summer, I’m undertaking an exciting new project: building a chatbot that supports Lehigh’s student publication, The Brown and White. Ideally, this chatbot will be able to access a database of The Brown and White’s previous publications, in order to provide journalists, editors and readers alike with context for and information from prior pieces. All the while, I’ll be documenting the process here at Don’t Count Us Out Yet!

Before I break down the steps of this project, let me make it clear that I am no computer science expert. In fact, during my time in college I took two semesters worth of Java programming… and let's just say that tears of frustration were definitely shed. I do, however, know some MATLAB and have taken a course in the theory behind artificial intelligence programming.

I spoke on the phone recently with Jay Schimmel, an entrepreneur working on developing AI courses for professionals. Jay took Dan Shipper’s chatbot building course, and he explained to me that in addition to the regularly scheduled classes, he also put in an additional 2-3 hours each week learning Python on YouTube. This helped put into context what the AI systems were actually doing. Jay stressed to me that it was important for one to at least be familiar with the concepts of coding before taking this type of course, but the course taught him how to identify the limitations of a chatbot and how to make one smarter.

After looking through the reviews and specifications of various online programs, I decided to enroll in a course offered by IBM through CognitiveClass.ai; it’s a beginner course in building a chatbot using IBM’s Watson Assistant and instructs on how to deploy the chatbot on WordPress-based sites, such as Slack. In the next two weeks or so, I will find out whether some basic knowledge of Python is useful or necessary for this “no coding required” course!

So without further ado, the following is a loose plan of action:

• Step 1: Review literature on how to build a chatbot without programming experience and begin a course on building a chatbot without any coding.

• Step 2: Discuss with The Brown and White staff/editors what simple queries the chatbot should handle and how to make sure it doesn’t go out of bounds.

• Step 3: Build the prototype!

• Step 4: Perform a beta test on selected journalism students, The Brown and White editors, and faculty.

• Step 5: Revise the model and open the chatbot to a select group before the start of the fall semester.

• Step 6: Gather and implement new suggestions that users might have for additional areas the chatbot can service.

• Step 7: Create a simple list of prompts that might be useful for users as the chatbot becomes available to the Lehigh community.

By the start of the fall semester, we hope for The Brown and White to be one of the first student publications that has a chatbot integrated into what they do. Its uses may expand as time goes on, but we want to start small, as this is a big step in the journalism world. It would be naive to ignore the impacts that generative AI will have on the communication industry, so we feel that it is critical to stay ahead of the game and use this new technology to our advantage, while also educating on and protecting against any potential dangers.

I am really looking forward to working on this project and documenting all of the fun, exciting, challenging and rewarding aspects of the process here at Don’t Count Us Out Yet! Stay tuned for the next update on what I’ve learned about building a chatbot with little programming experience…

Best,

Nina for the Don’t Count Us Out Yet Team