Concord

Concord is an AI Discord bot for CVE polling, playing music, and more.

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Technologies

• The core of the application is built using Discord.js

• The AI features are utilized from the Wit.ai API

• Voice recognition was accomplish using Opus

Packages used

• fluent-ffmpeg
• underscore --save
• node-witai-speech --save
• ffmpeg-binaries
• opusscript
• ytdl-core
• youtube-search
• node-opus

System Requirements

• Node.js
• espeak (optional, allows the bot to speak)
  • Can be installed on linux systems with apt-get install espeak -y
• ffmpeg
  • The above link can be used to download for Mac and Windows, for Linux systems, you can use apt-get install ffmpeg -y

Getting started

• Clone the repository with git clone, and run npm install
  • It's very likely that it will be necessary to run npm rebuild to get ffmpeg aligned with your distributed package, so run the rebuild command if you get ffmpeg related errors.
• Set all your keys cand configuration options in a file called config.js
  • An example config file can be copied and modifed cp config.example.js config.js and modify it as needed.
• If you recveive errors related to any of the npm packages listed above, try installing them with npm install <package name>, if this doesn't work, try running npm update

Creating new commands

The bot utilizes a custom class Loader found inside the loader.js file. This class will keep track of all bot commands. Before adding a command to the Loader class, we need to instantiate a new command object, this command object will hold specific properties about the command, such as auth, locked, etc.

We'll start by adding a simple hello command. By default all commands should be set inside the /functions folder, with a somewhat recognizable file name, in this case, we'll call it hello.js.

// Require our Loader class as methodManager
const methodManager = require('../loader')

// define our function ( this will be the cb property below)
function hello () {
  console.log('Hello, world!');
}

let helloMethod = {
  name: '!hello', locked: false, help: '!hello', cb: hello
}
methodManager.add(helloMethod)

// Additionally, the function could be an anonymous function
// The following code is equivalent to the above
methodManager.add({
  name: '!hello',
  locked: false,
  help: 'hello',
  cb: () => { console.log('Hello, world!'); }
})

While the above example gives you an idea of how the Loader works, it's not very useful until you understand how to access the bot properties, such as the current channel. To do this, pass a props parameter to your functions, which will be an object housing all of the client properties that command will need.

Inside app.js, you'll notice a line of code checking for command validity, and exucuting accordingly, passing in the props object. I'll extract the relavent information below.

let parts = msg.content.split(' ')
let cmd = parts[0]

// everything after the command call
let options = parts.slice(1, parts.length).join(' ')

if (methodManager.isMethod(cmd)) {

  // HERE IS WHERE THE props ARE DEFINED AND PASSED
  let props = {client, msg, parts, options}
  methodManager.execute(cmd, props)
}

Typically, those props passed will be enough to do anything you need, but you can modify this as desired or required.

Let's finally finish with an example of replying to a user with the text they sent, wrapped in a command called repeat

// FILE: /functions/repeat.js
const methodManager = require('../loader')

function repeat (props) {
  // get what the user said through the props.parts property
  let content = props.parts.slice(1, props.parts.length).join(' ')

  // send our reply to the message, pulled from the msg property
  props.msg.reply(content)
}
let repeatMethod = {
  name: '!repeat',
  locked: false,
  help: '!repeat <string>',
  cb: repeat
}
methodManager.add(repeatMethod)

Voice commands

Currently, I do not have any kind of lazy loading for voice commands, but I plan to in the future. As of now, voice commands are hard coded inside the /services/speech_recognition.js file inside the handleSpeech function.

Todo's

• Lazy-load voice commands with some class
• Modify the CVE and SpeechRecognition classes to not take client as a contrutor argument (it's sloppy and hacked together)
• Improve AI throught the wit.ai console
• Improve directory structure and overall design structure
• I would like to remove espeak and hopefully use some alternative, like an API, as some server's may not be able to output audio as needed, making espeak problematic.