Asynchronous Chat Generation

[kevinthedang]

Idea

• As of version v0.4.0, chat's with the bot are "synchronous" meaning it is a handshake process to get the bot to talk,

• It would be interesting to see how the bot can work asynchronously. That is, given access to chat in any channel that is not labeled as private on discord.
• So, if there was a conversation between many people about something like TypeScript, bugs, etc, then the bot would try to figure out whether or not to join the chat.
• Essentially, it's message history becomes some arbitrary amount of messages when it decides to start talking.

Example?

...

user1: some message about some topic

user2: some message about the same topic

Discord bot: provides some message or input on the topic

...

[kevinthedang]

Some thoughts:

• There will be certain channels where people might not care or want the bot to chat in.
• We should have some kind of rule where the bot is not allowed to think it can reply in the channel. (For example, in a announcement channel were replies are not really expected at all)
• How informative should these responses be? Short and sweet in the middle of a conversation? Long and descriptive to ensure it makes sense in the context of the conversation? (I guess somewhat longer than short)

[JT2M0L3Y]

The only way I could see the bot "deciding whether to join" would be if any new context (user messages) contain a question.

[kevinthedang]

More thoughts:

• Sometimes new contexts don't have to appear as questions which can be problematic.
• For now we can think of jumping in as say for example "Does anyone know why I should cook food rather than get takeout?" This becomes something where anyone can answer and where the bot can do it's best to provide an answer to that question.

@JT2M0L3Y

[JT2M0L3Y]

The second point would require somewhat of a timeout before answering or a check that someone has/hasn't responded. Unless, we don't care about potentially disruptive or repetitive interjections.

[kevinthedang]

This feature is likely post-release work if we choose to pursue it.