The Joy Bot

Repository for shehacks project: a chatbot that can help diagnose mental health issues made using React and Dialogflow

Purpose

This webapp allows you to interact with Joy, a chatbot designed to help you go through moments of depression and anxiety. You can converse with Joy through text messages and let out how you feel; Joy will listen and recommend what you can do in the moment to feel better. You can also access calming exercises, diagnostic tests, and other helpful resources easily through our website. We also have a music player that recommends songs based on the mood of the conversation. Users are fully anonymous. None of their data is collected, so everyone can feel safe while using Joy.

Devpost: https://devpost.com/software/the-joy-bot

Screenshot

How It Works

1. We used agents on Dialogflow - Google's NLP platform
2. We collected data from Reddit (r/depression, r/depressed, r/anxiety, r/adhd) and Quora to train subagents for Joy so the bot could detect sentiments accurately. To see how the bot should respond, we used highest voted responses on Reddit and read some research papers.
3. We connected an endpoint in our Express backend to the Dialogflow API so the frontend didn't need our API credentials
4. The frontend React application has components for the chatbot, music player, accordians and navbar. It makes requests to the Express backend when a user sends a message to get a response. The backend forwards this request to the Dialogflow API

Setup

1. Clone the repository

2. Add an .env file to the root directory with values for DIALOGFLOW_PROJECT_ID and DIALOGFLOW_LANGUAGE_CODE. It will look something like this:

DIALOGFLOW_PROJECT_ID = 'project-id-xxxx'
DIALOGFLOW_LANGUAGE_CODE = 'en'

3. Add the JSON file with service account credentials to the api directory (cd api from the root directory). Name this file private.json Note: I accidentally pushed this file to our repo, but you shouldn't. I have regenerated our credentials now :)

4. npm install and npm start in the root directory and in the api directory. The directory structure is a little messed up right now - the root directory is the frontend directory, but the api (backend) directory is inside it. I will fix this (soon)

Known Issues:

1. React Scripts: if you get an issue due to this, use yarn add react-scripts. This seems to fix this issue on macOS.