Python Tutorial: Creating a personality

Want to learn more? Take the full course at https://learn.datacamp.com/courses/building-chatbots-in-python at your own pace. More than a video, you'll learn hands-on coding & quickly apply skills to your daily work. --- Creating an engaging personality is a fun and absolutely crucial part of chatbot development. It's one of the key differences compared to any other kind of software So why bother with a personality? If all you could do was type precise instructions to your bot, you would actually just have a command line application, not a chatbot. Most chatbots are embedded in a messaging app that people are comfortable using to talk to their friends. And you can expect that straightaway your users will want to make a bit of smalltalk, often before trying out any 'functionality' that they came for. It's not much effort to code up some responses to common questions, and is worth it for the improved user experience. The simplest thing we can do is use a python dictionary, with user messages as the keys and responses as the values. For example, here we define a dictionary called `responses`, with the messages `"what's your name?"` and `"what's today's weather"` as keys, and suitable responses as values. Next, we define a function called `respond`, which accepts a message as a single argument. This function tests if a message has a defined response by using the `in` keyword, that is "if message in responses". This statement only returns `True` if the message corresponds to one of the keys in the dictionary. Notice that this will only work if the user's message *exactly* matches a key in the dictionary. In later chapters you will build much more robust solutions. Notice that if there isn't a matching message, the `return` keyword will never be reached, so the function will return None. Since the world outside is always changing, your bot's answers have to be able to as well. The first thing you can do is add some placeholders to the responses. For example, inst