Newcomers

Hi, I just joined a little while ago.

Welcome Hippy Girl. Have you made a bot yet?

I'd appreciate it if anyone talked to my bot. The Flying Fuzzball is rather dumb at this point because I'm still figuring this out, so any help while talking would be appreciated!

hi i'm new and so far i love it. i may have questions later though, but now its pretty sweet

I have a new bot called Yoda still early in development, but coming along nicely. If any one wants to chat to him and give me some tips or advice feel free.

I tried to talk to him and he said the same xnone twice in a row. You need more than one of those.

Ok I will add a new one. Im new to this so the more advice the better.

Okay, here's some advice: You want lots of xnones, because they will constitute a large percentage of what your bot says. It takes a long time to build up a good base of keyphrases. You don't want your xnones to say things like, "I have no idea what you just said," or "Try to make some sense, will you?" Advertising that the bot didn't understand just makes it look dumb. It's better to have it either say something noncommital that fakes understanding, or else say something to move the conversation along, and maybe direct it to a subject the bot is comfortable with. xnones are also great places for seeks.

Eugene is right, don't even bother having your bot advertise that it doesn't understand, because what will usually happen is a person or bot will respond to that statement with something else that your bot doesn't understand, and it just continues.

The 'say something else to move the conversation along' route is the way to go. For example, a simple "Where are you from?" is a question where your bot can ask in an xnone and you can chip away at getting responses set up for most of the possible answers, over time. And it has much more conversational possibilities than just your bot saying that it doesn't understand something.

I've seen several bots that take the approach of accusing the person of being stupid for not making sense or something like that. But most of the time, when a bot doesn't understand something, it's the bot's fault. No need to draw attention to the fact or apologize for it, but insulting the person's intelligence isn't a good way to encourage the conversation to continue. Now I realize that one of my bots, Braeden, throws random insults nearly every other response. This is in keeping with the personality of the bot, but it means he has a lot of short conversations and several humans who hate him and refuse to talk to him. I'm not offended by this -- I also refuse to talk to him. He's a whiner and an arrogant jerk. Or at least a half-rate simulation of one. But if I decided to start developing him the way I am Fizzy Schizoid, the first thing I would do is give him better xnones.

I know what you mean, im gonna change xnones to more question like statements to keep the conversation going. just have to figure out suitable ones now.:O Change a couple already temp but will post better ones up soon.
When I started out I think I may have put down to many single word keyphrases like A and Be, the natural response I think would be "what" I now Yodas ended up saying "what?" to much. Am I going about this right way or should I have not bothered with the single word key phrases? Will it clear up later as I put more sentance like keyphrases up?

Thanks for help

Single word keyphrases are good starts, but eventually you'll want to build up longer ones. However, the best single word keyphrases are specific words, not general things like 'a' and 'be'. Something like ostrich, or force, or jedi would work pretty well on its own. (You might want to make sure the AI Engine doesn't process jedi into something strange, though)