As someone who's been using ChatGPT for a while now, I've been exploring how to maximise its benefits and integrate it into my daily life. I've been working on a side project to develop a Discord bot that interacts with ChatGPT, similar to the one provided by OpenAI. At first, it was just an attempt to learn more about ChatGPT and bot development, but as I progressed I realised that other people might find it useful as well. It's fascinating to see how intelligent AI technology is finding its way into everyday platforms like Discord.
Discord Bot powered by ChatGPT API
Prerequisites
DiscordGo - provides low-level bindings to the Discord chat client API.
Go OpenAI - provides Go clients for the OpenAI API.
Above are two main packages (dicordgo and go-openai) use to build this ChatGPT Discord Bot. They have great examples of different kinds of use cases that we can build our own logic around.
Things that need to be Handled
Handle Longer Responses from ChatGPT
Due to the character limit on Discord (2000 characters per message at the time of writing), it may be necessary for longer replies from ChatGPT to be split up and sent as multiple messages. It's important to note that when messages are split into multiple parts, the character may be truncated if we don't count the number of characters correctly, especially if we're dealing with languages like Mandarin or Japanese where one character can be multiple bytes. Therefore it's recommended to use the Unicode character count instead of simply counting the number of bytes like len(). This can be done using the utf8.RuneCountInString() function instead. By using this method we can ensure that each part of the message contains complete characters and avoid confusing or misleading messages. It's important to be aware of these language-specific nuances when working with text messages in Golang or any other programming language.
To find out more about managing Strings, bytes, runes, and characters in Go, please visit the Go Blog.
func SendMessageByChunk(message string, chunkLength int, send chan<- string) {
counter := 0
lastIndex := 0
for i, w := 0, 0; i < len(message); i += w {
counter++
_, width := utf8.DecodeRuneInString(message[i:])
w = width
if counter == chunkLength {
chunk := message[lastIndex : i+w]
send <- chunk
lastIndex = i + w
counter = 0
}
}
if len(message) > 0 && lastIndex < len(message) {
send <- message[lastIndex:]
}
close(send)
}
In the above example, we create a function to send messages of a certain length (chunkLength). To handle Unicode characters correctly, we can use utf8.DecodeRuneInString() to decode the first UTF-8 encoded Unicode code point in the given string and get the number of bytes it occupies. We iterate through the string until all the characters (runes) are decoded.
Application Command Timeout on Discord
Another limitation that may arise is Discord's application command timeout, which at the time of writing is set at 3 seconds. This means that if ChatGPT takes longer than 3 seconds to respond, users will receive an error message indicating that the application has not responded. As ChatGPT can take longer than that to respond, the bot needs to delay the response by setting the interaction callback type DEFERRED_CHANNEL_MESSAGE_WITH_SOURCE to acknowledge that the event has been received and that a follow-up will come later. I also think it's good practice for the bot to let users know that their message has been received and is being processed. By implementing these strategies, ChatGPT can provide a better user experience on Discord.
The following code snippet from this project shows how we can defer or delay replies via DiscordGo.
err := s.InteractionRespond(i.Interaction, &discordgo.InteractionResponse{
Type: discordgo.InteractionResponseDeferredChannelMessageWithSource,
})
Motivation behind the Project
I've been a frequent user of ChatGPT ever since it was launched by OpenAI. Their Chat App has proven to be very useful in speeding up my daily tasks and even occasionally planning my travel itinerary. It has been really powerful and I no longer have to go through the hassle of searching endless websites and connecting the dots myself. Although the app's interface looks nice, with real-time updates, the connection can be unreliable at times. Another drawback I noticed is that users have to log in before they can use the app's features, which may seem like a minor inconvenience but could be a deal-breaker for those who value ease of use.
Conclusion
We did not cover all the details of building this project in this article but feel free to visit the GitHub page to play around with it 😊
The best way of learning about anything is by doing. - Richard Branson
If you're interested in running the bot for your Discord server or contributing to the development of the project, please visit the GitHub page. Welcome any suggestions or ideas for improving the code 💪🏽
Hopefully, you found something useful.
Thank you for reading.
