Build WhinnyBot 🐴

Imagine a stable helper that knows four things perfectly: how to greet you, what horses like, whether carrots make good treats, and one truly terrible horse joke. It is not guessing and it is not using AI. You write every answer yourself, store the answers under useful names, and let the program fetch the right one.

Ingredient 1: the prompt

A prompt is the message a person sends to a program. In this lesson, it is whatever you type into WhinnyBot's input box. Our first bot is deliberately simple, so a good prompt is a short keyword that matches something the bot knows.

Ingredient 2: a dictionary

In JavaScript, a dictionary is usually called an object. It stores pairs: a key is the lookup word, and its value is the information stored under that word.

const answers = {
  "hello":  "Neigh there! Welcome to the stable.",
  "horse":  "Horses can sleep standing up or lying down.",
  "carrot": "Carrots are treats, not a whole horse dinner.",
  "joke":   "Why did the pony whisper? It was a little horse!",
  "default": "I do not know that one yet. Teach me!"
};

The colon means “stores this value”, and the comma separates one pair from the next. To look up an answer, put the prompt inside square brackets:

let answer = answers[prompt];

If prompt contains "carrot", JavaScript fetches the value stored at answers["carrot"].

Build it in p5.js

const answers = {
  "hello":  "Neigh there! Welcome to the stable.",
  "horse":  "Horses can sleep standing up or lying down.",
  "carrot": "Crunchy, orange, and best as a small treat!",
  "joke":   "Why did the pony whisper? It was a little horse!",
  "default": "I do not know that one yet. Teach me!"
};

let promptInput;
let replyText;

function setup() {
  noCanvas();

  promptInput = createInput("");
  promptInput.attribute("placeholder", "Try: hello, horse, carrot, joke");

  let sendButton = createButton("Ask WhinnyBot");
  sendButton.mousePressed(answerPrompt);

  replyText = createP("Neigh there! Ask me something.");
}

function answerPrompt() {
  let prompt = promptInput.value().toLowerCase().trim();
  let answer = answers[prompt];

  if (answer === undefined) {
    answer = answers.default;
  }

  replyText.html(answer);
  promptInput.value("");
}