Interview bot

This is a small linear interview chat bot, whose purpose is to collect information about trucks that the user/client wants to add to their trucking fleet, and construct a .csv file with the full truck fleet data. In addition, the bot will output the content of the conversation in a .txt file for eventual future analysis. File names of the output data files are generated based on the date of conversation, name of the user, and truck fleet ID/designation.

As an additional feature, the script compares the truck brand name that the user entered with the list of truck manufactureres scrapped from Wikipedia, and offers suggestions for correct spelling.

Prerequisites

• Python >=3.5
• pandas
• bs4 (BeautifulSoup4)

Versions

The current version of the main script is the final one before I convert it to OOP paradigm.

v1.2

• Removed former "v1" and renamed "v2" script to just "truck_bot"
• Exchanged the hack from former "v2" script with calls to global variables

v1.1

• Introduced capability for recognizing and correcting truck brands from user input. If the user enters a brand whose name does not match something from the list, the script will offer a suggestion.
• Various bug fixes.

Example data

I have included the data folder with four example data sets: one where the user just follows the instructions in a straightforward manner ("ABC123"), one where the user has corrected several entries ("HansKristian"), one where the user interrupted the script mid-way ("Interrupting"), and one where user quit in the very first line ("user87926").

Notes

There are several assumptions I made in the script for the sake of expediency. All of them can be expanded or fixed as needed.

Domain-related

• It is assumed that every fleet will have a separate ID/designation. There are no limitations on which characters this designation can contain, which might introduce problems when constructing file names for save data.
• It is assumed that truck model has a very precise pattern for the name: two letters, followed by space, followed by a series of numbers. This is most certainly not the case in reality, and was introduced here just for the sake of expediency.

Code-related

• The script assumes that data folder already exists, and that its path is fixed.
• There is no unit conversion if users want to use for example liters instead of cubic centimeters for engine capacity.
• There is no conversion of values entered as a text (e.g. "thirty five") to numbers ("35"). When asked for values, numbers must be given.