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I built An Offline ChatBot Companion Raspberry Pi Robot

  This post also has a  YouTube version. Meet Katherine my personalized offline conversational companion chatbot, which can answer questions, give facts on anything, and can remember and comprehend.  I made this chatbot without any large language models. So no-GPT essentially. After years of working on my own conversational software as a hobby, I finally have a prototype I can use to demonstrate. This is Katherine my offline chatbot. I named it after Katherine Johnson - A human computer that worked for NASA. Katherine is powered by my own python code , some public libraries, and local files. I’ve spent a few years learning different strategies for closed looped conversational system. Thanks to Katherine here, I think I’m on the right track. Why did I make Katherine?  Well aside from having my own personalized chatbot, l wanted to be able to have a companion robot that I could talk to no matter the situation. Whether it be a Power outage, or a camping trip, my compani...

Places To Start

 


   
Ok so boom.........as a programmer, you create instructions in a particular language (or languages) on a particular computer. The first thing I'd say that is the most important thing to do as a beginner, is just starting to code. The language that is the easiest for you to run without any setup requirements, is the best language for you right now. 

What do I mean by that?

Software you can run without installing a million tools, slowing down your hardware, making it think too much for you just to get familiar with the landscape. You may have borrowed your mom's computer to do these tutorials(which already runs slow). They shouldn't break her device just so that you can run a few lines of code.

After you're familiar with how code can move in a certain language, you now have a base to compare to, and can move to another language. But which language should this final language be??

 First, there is no limit to the amount of languages you can learn. It'll just be difficult managing the rules of each language. Secondly, you should be learning the language that is most useful to your ideas/plans/applications, languages that are popular, or languages that are old but require human touch. (That last one is mostly a job security finesse, as companies have this situation a-lot, leading them to train new employees to run code nobody uses anymore.....This can be lucrative $$$).

For me, writing code in css , javascript and html (internet / web languages) gave me the most freedom and best experience becoming a programmer. 

  • They only require an internet connection for the tutorials , which can be downloaded
  • They are popular languages and the backbone of internet software
  • They can control not only back-end(code you don't see or expect to see) but front-end as well(code you see visually, color, graphs etc...). This is important because with these 3 languages and no professional experience, you can create animations, and games all from your desktop.
You don't have to use those to start but, I highly advise it. Now to the main portion of this post.... 

References:

Web/server/more...
https://www.w3schools.com/

UI + Science + Web
https://tutsplus.com/

Programming Help / Community (All languages subjects)
www.stackoverflow.com

Random Help /Community (All subjects not just software)
www.stackexchange.com

Open Source Code/projects
https://github.com/

Coding can be very difficult , so it's best to stay informed and always have a template or something to compare against. The references above are a great place to acquire a firm base of software knowledge, and to reach out and network with more experienced people than yourself. Just be aware, that the dev community love people that read and can follow directions...oh and also a good screen shot of any problem that you may have.

I hope this post was helpful, ya'll be easy, and feel free to comment any other useful links as well.



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