Building MDBot - an intelligent Discord bot for MDB

Jul 01, 2020 Shomil Jain

To stay connected during shelter-in-place in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, my club (MDB) turned to Discord as a new platform for voice & social interactions. After hearing about Discord’s easy-to-use Developer API, I decided to build a Discord Bot to supplement our conversations & add to the social atmosphere. Below, I describe how I set up and deployed the bot, as well as everything I’ve trained it to do!

View the GitHub Project here.

Setting Up a Discord Client

To get started, I followed this tutorial over at Real Python. After initial setup of the Discord server (a.k.a. guild), it’s pretty simple to create a bot that can respond to “/” commands sent in any thread.

The Discord Python library follows the asynchronous style described below.

To initialize a client, we use client = discord.Client().
When a message is sent, the async def on_message(message) method is triggered.
- To customize a response, we can use message.author or message.content
- We can filter messages by looking for prefixes: message.content.startswith('/')
- We can respond to messages by sending await message.channel.send(...)
To run the client (and start listening for messages), we use client.run(TOKEN), where TOKEN is the Discord API Token described in the tutorial above.

I deployed the library to a Heroku dyno by simply linking the GitHub project to a new Heroku Project.

MDBot Commands

/spoof (name)

Uses a Markov Chain text generator trained on Facebook Messenger Group Chats from the current and all previous semesters of the club to generate a fake sentence that often has eerily similar language/voice/tone to the person being spoofed.

Since I wanted to keep this repository public while keeping the actual content of the messages private, I encrypted the training data with Fernet before uploading it to GitHub for Heroku deployment. The private key is stored as an environment variable.

/class (number)

Uses the BerkeleyTime API to look up enrollment data for a particular class. Only works on CS/EECS classes at the moment!

/job (company)

We have an internal database of what companies people have worked at (and where our Alumni work as well). This command pulls the names & LinkedIn profiles of people who’ve worked at a particular company. It’s super useful during recruiting season!

/overheard (name)

This one’s based on an internal “overheard” repository that we keep. It’s essentially filled with a bunch of funny/random/out-of-context quotes by individuals of the club. This command pulls from the Airtable base containing these records and sends a randomly selected quote.

/idea

A few years ago, a member of our club wrote a script to generate a bunch of Silicon Valley-esque startup ideas based on fixed templates. Check out the list here. This command randomly selects an idea and returns it.

/habit

Returns a randomly-selected habit from the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s an inside joke :)

/joke

Returns a random joke from this API.

/quote

Returns a random quote from this API.

/sliver

Scrapes & returns the current day’s menu from Sliver.