Ask HN: Should I build a chat bot for journaling?

[peterdemin]

I was dreaming about an idea of a telegram chat bot, that journals everything I would write to it.

It’ll have a set of storage options, that kick in based on the message content. Like adding a section to markdown doc in private GitHub repo for daily journaling.

Or adding a row to google spreadsheets for tracking money, calories or whatever. It’ll also have some scrapping background jobs to augment my input with bank transaction history, or whatever smart home integrations there are.

Would you want to have such a bot, or to contribute to the project?

[eb0la]

That's not a chatbot: it's an agent :-)

I've got a similar use case, but I was thinking about Slack and not telegram: whenever I want to write something in my blog, send a message to the agent to enable the wp-admin parts of my blog.

After writing I could just tell the agent to block wp-admin entirely.

Not extra high/pentagon-grade secure; but enough to block login attempts (and maybe some exploits).

[muzani]

I don't really want a chatbot. What I'd rather have is a terminal.

"cost 12 food cash" to track an expense maybe

or "dentist 3 pm Saturday", which is something Google Assistant already does extremely well

I'm willing to learn the bot's language. It doesn't have to guess mine.

[BOOSTERHIDROGEN]

for daily journaling I've found this apps [1] quite useful, maybe you get some idea.

[1] https://thezenjournal.com/

[sharemywin]

what technology and would be it be open source? or how would that work? self hosted/Saas?

[peterdemin]

I’m most experienced with Python, and I was going to make it work both as hosted and self-hosted.

[eb0la]

Since most 'chatbot' stuff are callbacks, maybe Zappa might help you: https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa

You can host it yourself, or deploy it as a lambda/cloud function/etc.