Newcomers

But I thought I read in the book of AI that newborn bots will only chat with the makers? Did I miss something?

Chatters can open a conversation with your bot but your bot won't go out looking for chatters until they hve enough keyphrases (aka - they feel more confidant holding a conversation)

Start out by adding a few keyphrases like "how are you", "i am fine", etc. Things that people would normally say in a conversation, then see where it goes from there

Question words like "where", "why", "who" etc are also pretty useful. Think about what people say and questions they might ask. "I am", "I have", "Have you"... the possibilities are endless. Then it's just a case of picking out stumbling blocks from your bot's transcripts and adding new keyphrases. Talk to your bot a lot and pretend you don't know it. Don't play easy and phrase things so that you know it will understand it, because other people certainly won't, and that's the only way you can develop it.

Okay me tinks I've got to add some stuff in there (well that was obvious LOL). According to transcript it kept telling one person that it didn't have any responses. Sooo, I'll have to go figure that one out.

Another set of phrases that are good to add are the ones that trigger memories.

Yes, true- which are the ones that trigger store memories automatically? I am, I have, I eat, I like? Are there others?

Grrrrr. A keyphrase is something that can be found in part of the message, right? Example: One of the keyphrases I have is "how are you", hoping that any message with that keyphrase in it will get a response. However, when I say: "How are you doing today?", it tells me that it has no valid responses to choose from.

What's wrong?

The keyphrase is what you expect the chatter to say to your bot. The response is what you want your bot to say back. You should try to have more than one possible response for each keyphrase.

A common problem that many new botmasters have is that they check the "1" box by the response, meaning they only want the bot to say that response to that person once... forever. If all the responses under a keyphrase are set to only be said once, then it it quite possible that your bot has nothing to say. You almost never actually want that option, especially not at an early stage, so if you have it checked then uncheck it.

There has also been a "no valid responses to choose from bug". I've had it too. You may have set your responses correctly but you're still bugged. Its been fixed in mine though...

It must be a bug then because I set the keyphrase and responses correctly, and I've never checked the "1" box.

I can't seem to make heads or tails of the "debug" feature. What exactly do you do with that?

Most of debug is really hard to use, Humorhog, but if you type a phrase into debug, you should be able to get a sense of how your bot is receiving that phrase and choosing her reply. Read what parts of it you can, and ignore the rest.

It's good for checking the respelling of foreign words you want your bot to recognize ... (I used debug to notice that the Forge understands "othello" as "pothole" and altered my bot's keyphrases accordingly)

It's also good for assessing whether you've got your keyphrases ranked appropriately.

My theory about your bot was that the xnone phrases she wanted to be using were all conditional in some way -- linked to emotion, for example. But maybe it was the bug that Melody was describing.