Calling the Turing Robot API with Java HttpClient: A Complete Code Walkthrough

While experimenting with the Turing chatbot, I discovered that the previous GET‑based examples no longer work and that free, non‑authenticated users have lost their request quota, so a proper POST request with a valid API key is required.

The service now mandates an authenticated key and a JSON payload sent via POST.

Using Apache HttpClient's EntityUtils to parse the response works well, although the sample code is a bit dated.

Below is a complete Java method that builds the JSON payload, sends it to http://www.tuling123.com/openapi/api, reads the response stream, and extracts the chatbot's reply.

public static String getReplyFromRobot(String text) throws JSONException, ClientProtocolException, IOException {
    String url = "http://www.tuling123.com/openapi/api"; // API endpoint
    CloseableHttpClient httpClient = HttpClients.createDefault(); // create client
    JSONObject jsonObject = new JSONObject();
    jsonObject.put("key", "915b34e69c0371"); // your API key
    jsonObject.put("info", text); // user message
    // jsonObject.put("loc", "Beijing Zhongguancun"); // optional location
    jsonObject.put("userid", "915b34e41cb351c0371"); // user ID
    String arguments = changeJsonToArguments(jsonObject); // convert JSON to query string
    HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(url + arguments); // POST request
    HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(httpPost); // get response
    InputStream inputStream = response.getEntity().getContent();
    InputStreamReader reader = new InputStreamReader(inputStream, "utf-8");
    StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();
    char[] buff = new char[512];
    int length = 0;
    while ((length = reader.read(buff)) != -1) {
        String x = new String(buff, 0, length);
        System.out.println(x);
        buffer.append(x);
    }
    JSONObject dsa = new JSONObject(buffer.toString().trim());
    String message = dsa.getString("text");
    return message;
}

Replace the placeholder key with your own Turing API key, adjust the userid if needed, and the method will return the chatbot's textual reply.