A project of upgrading a simple chatbot

I initially wanted to learn how chatbot works and created a simple one on my own. However, there's a surprising amount of available codes that create chatbots of all levels. My task was to learn from this very simple chatbot model that uses straightforward NN of x and y, using stochastic gradient descent to predict the intention of the writer and generate an answer accordingly. As x is the input text, and y is the intention, the author marks 0 or 1 to the input texts. 1 is close to the intention, and 0 is the opposite. My idea of improvement is instead of marking 0 or 1 to the texts, I would implement words to vectors to create one hot encoded (X, Y) matrices, then feed the encoded words into the model.