Contents

• What is Chanakya?
• Where can it be used?
• Quickstart
• Any planned features?
• Wait, what does 'Chanakya' mean?
• Tools

What is Chanakya?

New: Chanakya now features plugins!

Chanakya is a simple yet completely customisable, scalable and lightweight chatbot. It is written wholly in C++ and is inspired by the AI concept of 'Expert Systems'. Chanakya has a simple mechanism:- It takes questions from the user, consults a local knowledge base and returns a result. I've listed down some of Chanakya's major features and differences from other chatbots.

• Chanakya's field of expertise can be completely customised by you, the user! Using a simple syntax that I created for this purpose, you can create knowledge bases for Chanakya on any topic.

• It is extremely scalable. The knowledge base can be increased or decreased with very little impact on performance.

• Chanakya is a lightweight application and consumes very little memory and CPU time!

• Chanakya features plugins! Plugins can be written for different topics and accessed by the user (as demonstrated below).

• It returns fast and accurate results even if the grammar and semantics of the question aren't exactly correct.

  Chanakya: Hey there! I'm Chanakya!
  Ask me anything about 'Star Wars - The Force Awakens'!
  
  You: who is the director?
  Chanakya: JJ Abrams.
  
  You: when did the movie release?
  Chanakya: The worldwide release was 25th December, 2015.
  
  You: offtopic
  Chanakya: You have enabled the secondary topics. Ask me anything about movies.
  
  You: know any good animation movies?
  Chanakya: Movies from the genre 'Animation' are listed below with the years of their releases.
  
  WALL-E (2008)				Onward (2020)
  The Incredibles (2006)			Bolt (2008)
  Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse (2018)	Lion King (1994)
  
  You: awesome, could you tell me more about "Lion King"?
  Chanakya: The information about the movie 'Lion King' is as follows:-
  
  Lion King (1994)
  Summary: A lion cub, exiled from his home, returns to claim his right to the throne.
  
  You: thanks okay ontopic again
  Chanakya: I've now updated my brain to the main topic again. Let's do this! 
  
  You: han solo actor name
  Chanakya: Harrison Ford.
  
  You: bye
  Chanakya: Okay, bye!
  

A sample exchange between the user and Chanakya with a 'Star Wars' knowledge base. We can see that Chanakya doesn't need perfect grammar to understand what the user is asking.

Where can it be used?

Right now, Chanakya isn't really a production-grade application. It is still a work-in-progress. However, I am planning to develop a web API which will be able to take questions from a webpage and then return a result. In any case, Chanakya has a wide variety of use-cases in day-to-day life.

• A fun personal assistant or chatbot to talk to!
• An educational and interactive bot for children to learn about various topics and subjects. For example, the 'Bengal Tiger' knowledge base which I've created could be used to let children learn more about the animal and its eating and living habits.
• An interactive tour guide. Chanakya could be installed at any monument or heritage site and be used to educate visitors about the place.
• An e-commerce shopkeeper which could potentially help customers locate or find a product of their choice amongst the items in a shop.

Quickstart

• Clone or download the repository to your machine.

• Navigate to the /src folder and run the following commands.

  For Linux and Mac (in Terminal)

  $ c++ chanakya.cpp -std=c++0x
  

  For Windows (in Command Prompt)

  cl chanakya.cpp
  

• You can now choose the domain or topic that Chanakya will converse about. Navigate to the /data folder and take a look at the different topics present. Once you have decided the topic, navigate to the /config folder and edit prog.config accordingly.

  name = Chanakya .
  field = <field name here> .
  knowledge_file = ../data/<chat file name here> .
  

  For example, amongst the topics in the /data directory, if you'd like to choose Taj Mahal, then your prog.config file would look something like this.

  name = Chanakya .
  field = Taj Mahal .
  knowledge_file = ../data/tajmahal.chat .
  

• Now, execute the following commands, and voila! You should now have a fully-functioning chatbot!

  For Linux and Mac (in Terminal)

  $ ./a.out
  

  For Windows (in Command Prompt)

  chanakya
  

• Feel free to point out mistakes or give any criticisms!

Any planned features?

Here's a list of some of the features I'd like to implement in the future in no particular order.

Since the project is something that I'm doing for fun, I'd ideally like to implement all of the following features from scratch, ie, without the use of any external libraries.

• Word Stemming - This might help conserve space when adding keywords for a particular branch in the knowledge base.
• Web API - An API which can help webpages utilise Chanakya with a simple function call.
• Approximate Spellings - In case the spelling of a word is wrong, then an approximation of what the correct word might be can be done.
• Documentation - A proper documentation for Chanakya's logic, code and usage.
• Context - Adding 'context' to conversations with Chanakya.
• JSON and YAML - Support for new formats of knowledge bases so that devs don't have to learn a new format.

Etymology

It's named after Chanakya (371 BC - 283 BC), an ancient Indian teacher and royal advisor. Known for being a person who could answer the most ardous of questions, he is credited with playing an important role in the establishment of the Mauryan Empire.

Tools

• Vim Editor
• Clang C++ Compiler

Credits

• Criticker.com - Source for the 'Movies' plugin
• hollywoodreporter.com - Source for the 'Movies' plugin