thanks for the feedback. totally understand your point. i think the biggest problem is that the commenters here have a different understanding of the ambiguous term chatbot. the expectation is that AI or intelligent chatbot means it would pass the turing test and you would not notice if you are talking to a bot or human. but this is not the point.
everyone who has experience in natural language processing or computer vision could tell you about various sub-problems of AI which are all about equally hard. imagine you would have tried to build a similar program with the same outcome 10 years ago. you would probably be still working on it. today, you can build such a thing in one hour because multiple thousand hours of work went into the API and you can focus on the glue code. this makes it "easy" or "not too hard". AI becomes more and more available as a service and everyone can make use of it that's the whole idea
Feel free to use my code to make projects and participate in the $1,000,000 challenge that was just announced by telegram:
https://telegram.org/blog/botprize
Oh I see some people here have problems with my definition of a chatbot :D You're right it would not make up for great conversations. But, again just see it as motivation to build more on top.
Author here, great to see all the feedback! And I agree that the title can be read in different ways. But anyways: it was hard for me to find simple examples of how to build a more advanced chatbot. I think the Watson API is a great service to integrate with. The telegram API is very easy to use, powerful and fun. So the combination has potential for cool projects. I wanted to motivate bot makers to utilize whats out there and not create one copy cat and porn bot after another.
Moreover, the Watson API has good documentation and examples plus a variety of cool services that can enrich the chatbot experience. Wanted to provide a starting point if someone is interested in this topic.
Of course all the artificial intelligence is exclusively provided through Watson. I'm not saying that you can beat the Turing test with 50 lines of code or without external APIs. Just scratching the AI surface here ;-)