I have always wanted to tackle projects that teach valuable knowledge along the way. Creating an online chat system with an AI bot that can talk to you when you're lonely definitely seems like a challenge. I have always been very interested in AI and I feel like this is a perfect opportunity to dip my toes into that world.

ChatAway is going to be a web application that will allow you to connect with your friends. There will be a helpfull bot named Wilson who will be able to answer questions about ChatAway as well as hold a conversation with you. I will be deploying the help of a chat bot API in order to create this bot. There are many available APIs for my chat bot and I may change which one I am using in the creation process if I find a better alternative. At the moment I am looking at google's Dialogflow as it seems to be very robust and there is a lot of support for it which is necessary for someone inexperienced like me. My first goal is to have the bot be able to deal with and asnwer technical questions/issues. For example I want the bot to be able to help a user navigate to the profile settings or even change the user's username upon request. My goal is for the bot to also converse with a user about non-technical topics similarly to Cleverbot.

Communicating online can take several different forms and I want to implement a variety of such forms in my web application. Communication through text is the standard of course, but I would also like user to be able to audio and video chat. I will attempt to achieve this with WebRTC a project created a maintained by Google and others. I would also like to implement file sharing and screen sharing into this application as these seem to be part of the core features of any application that has a primary focus of P2P social communication.