🤖 Rule-Based Chatbot using Flask

A web-based chatbot built with Python, Flask, and JSON to respond to structured academic questions. If no relevant answer is found, the chatbot gracefully falls back to the DuckDuckGo API for a web-based answer.

---

💡 Features

• 🎯 Rule-based Q&A using RapidFuzz for fuzzy matching
• 🧠 Local knowledge base via qa_data.json
• 🌐 Fallback to DuckDuckGo API if no match is found
• 💬 Web-based chat UI using HTML/CSS + JavaScript
• 📂 Simple structure and easy to extend

---

🛠 Tech Stack

• Python 3.x
• Flask – web framework
• RapidFuzz – for fuzzy matching
• Requests – to call DuckDuckGo API
• HTML/CSS/JS – frontend
• JSON – knowledge base

---

▶️ How to Run This Project

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/SunainaHulkoti/rule-based-chatbot.git
cd rule-based-chatbot