Build your first AI chatbot: Silly Bot

About This Course

Build Your First AI Chatbot: Silly Bot is a hands-on course for students who have never written a line of code before. By the end, you will have designed, built, and deployed a real AI chatbot with a personality you invented — and you'll have a public link you can text to your friends so they can talk to it themselves.

The bot's "silly personality" doesn't come from a list of pre-written jokes. It comes from a short paragraph you write yourself, called a system instruction, that tells a real AI model (Google's Gemini, on its free tier — no credit card needed) who to be. Change a few sentences and your bot transforms from a polite robot butler into a dramatic pirate or a sarcastic potato. That one idea — that words you write can shape how an AI behaves — is the whole course in miniature.

The course moves in three phases, each one a visible "level": first you get a real AI to talk back to you in Python, then you give it a personality and a memory, then you wrap it in a real chat app (built with Streamlit) and ship it to a public web address. Grading rewards finishing and genuine effort, not finding one "correct" answer — your bot's personality is yours, and there's no wrong way to design it.