Opsdroid is a chatbot framework powered by different kinds of skills - which are basically python functions that interact with Opsdroid. The skill - words - takes advantage of the NLTK library to do things with words such as:

• Providing help by unscrambling letters in a scrabble game
• Providing definitions for a word
• Translating a word from a language into another language

Each function of the skill uses regex and groups to trigger the event and give meaning to what the user wishes to do.

The Good

• The scrabble helper only returns words that are at least 4 characters long
• If there is a long list of words that the user can form with the letters, 5 random words from that list are suggested
• The dictionary function gives a good basic information about a word
• Translating a word from English to another language works well

The Not So Good

• When the user triggers a function it takes between 1-3 seconds for results to appear
• Translating a word from a language other than English might not return any results
• The dictionary function doesn't show all the definitions of a word
• The dictionary examples come up as empty sometimes
• The synonyms list in the dictionary doesn't really show up synonyms

How it all came to be

By doing the 100 Days Of Code challenge and working on the challenges on Pybites. On challenge 5, we need to compare two twitter accounts and get the similarity index from them, after a quick research I figured it out that I could use NLTK to solve the issue. I spent a few days reading the documentation and working the examples. That's when I thought that perhaps we could implement these things in opsdroid. I started working on the idea and the skill - words came to be.

There are still plenty of things that can be improved and I have plans to fix the issues in order to make this skill even better and more pleasant to use.

Info

GitHub repo: https://github.com/opsdroid/skill-words