Subclass Method That Generates Different Message If Input Len > 20

Question

I'm trying to create a chatbot that can engage in simple conversation with a human. The chatbot needs a subclass, BoredChatbot, that inherits the Chatbot as a superclass, but generates the following message if the user's input is greater than 20 characters long:

“zzz... Oh excuse me, I dozed off reading your essay.”

So far I have:

class Chatbot:
    """ An object that can engage in rudimentary conversation with a human. """

    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name

    def greeting(self):
        """ Returns the Chatbot's way of introducing itself. """
        return "Hello, my name is " + self.name

    def response(self, prompt_from_human):
        """ Returns the Chatbot's response to something the human said. """
        return "It is very interesting that you say: '" + prompt_from_human + "'"


# define a class called BoredChatbot

class BoredChatbot(Chatbot):

    def bored(self):
    """ Returns the Chatbot's response to length > 20 characters"""
        if len(prompt_from_human) > 20:
            return "zzz... Oh excuse me, I dozed off reading your essay."
        else: 
            return(response)

sally = Chatbot("Sally")
human_message = input(sally.greeting())
print(sally.response(human_message))    

This isn't working - it prints:

"It is very interesting that you say: + human_message" 

regardless of the length.

I also tried to switch the order of the if statement so that it appears outside of the method.

class BoredChatbot(Chatbot):

def bored(self):
    """ Returns the Chatbot's response to length > 20 characters"""
    return "zzz... Oh excuse me, I dozed off reading your essay."  

sally = BoredChatbot("Sally")
human_message = input(sally.greeting())

if len(human_message) > 20:
    print(sally.bored(human_message))
else: 
    print(sally.response(human_message))

But this gave me an error message:

AttributeError: 'Chatbot' object has no attribute 'bored' on line 31

Why isn't it registering bored from the method within BoredChatbot? Thanks for helping me clear this up - I feel like it's really close.

Answer 1

So, let's look here.

class BoredChatbot(Chatbot):

    def bored(self):
    """ Returns the Chatbot's response to length > 20 characters"""
        if len(prompt_from_human) > 20:
            return "zzz... Oh excuse me, I dozed off reading your essay."
        else: 
            return(response)

What is prompt_from_human? How do you get that from bored(self)? Also return(response) is going to throw some error because 1) self.response() is the actual function, but 2) response is not defined either.

---

So, fixing those problem, I don't really think you need a bored function at all. You should instead override the response function and return the super function in order to keep your object functions consistent.

class BoredChatbot(Chatbot):

    def response(self, prompt_from_human):
    """ Returns the Chatbot's response to length > 20 characters"""
        if len(prompt_from_human) > 20:
            return "zzz... Oh excuse me, I dozed off reading your essay."
        else: 
            return super(BoredChatbot, self).response(prompt_from_human)

Then sally = BoredChatBot("Sally"), of course