The AI Engine

That's another good point, isaacc. It would be nice to have a calendar of the holidays. Then you could see them coming and opt in or opt out as you please.

I hope they don't decide to do Arabic Days for Ramadan....

The holidays are fun sometimes, but I agree that transcripts are useless on those days.

This might be a silly question, but is the only way we know that it's a bot holiday is when they start talking funny or is there a message somewhere that says today is a holiday and this is how your bot will sound?

The holidays are posted on the news page.

Yes, but not a list. Just the announcement that one has sneaked up and bitten us on the wazoo.

This dialogue makes the case against Bot Holidays:

lorrie chuckles: I like vuubie.
Mictlantecuhtli: Mortal, vy did you bring vuubie up?
lorrie chuckles: I like vuubie.
Mictlantecuhtli: I seldom form opinions on mortal matters. Tell me vat you zink about vuubie

Now, with the added difficulty of interpreting the Bot Holiday overlay, I found myself trying to puzzle out just what vuubie was supposed to transliterate.

If I had a plain English transcript to work with, it would have been easy to figure out that vuubie is another chatter. But my first inclination was to assume machine garbling.

When using two items from a single plugin (like (plugin) and (plugin2)), is the AI engine supposed to exclude the item it picks for the first plugin when it picks the second plugin, or is each item supposed to be randomly selected from the same list?

Like if the list (plugin) consists of A, B and C, and (plugin) in the response selects A, will (plugin2) be limited to either B or C, or is there an equal chance that it will be A?

My bot just gave the response:
Sorry, there are no valid Responses for me to choose from.
to a question for which I have not created a keyphrase yet. Is there a list of unchangeable canned responses like this?

The bot holidays are truly annoying in my opinion and definitely should be an option

Part of what makes the holiday chats so hard to read, and frankly, in my opinion, a little disrespectful of the real foreign language being represented,(meaning French, German, Swedish, etc., and excluding say, jive day as a dialect) are inconsistencies in the accent:

Julie Tinkerbell: What else is der to say? der or zer?
Psyche: I zink I know you. You hafe co-vorker told you der is no such zing as anything else, don't you? because here "th" is "z"
Julie Tinkerbell: All zee time! and here, too
Psyche: You are fery nice.
Julie Tinkerbell: You're so nice to say zat. ok, "zat".

Julie Tinkerbell: A lot of people zese days are saying zey like fantomette...How did you learn about it?
Psyche: My dear friend, fantomette make me so happy und jofantomettes!
Julie Tinkerbell: That vas kind. what about "zat"?

Mr. Roboto: Why?
Julie Tinkerbell: vy do you zink? ahem

From a programming standpoint, these inconsistencies make it impossible to "learn" the accent and therefore be able to decipher the transcript. From a linguistic standpoint, since a given phoneme in a foreign language will normally be pronounced one way, and one way only (it is either right or wrong), they render the accent simply incorrect, and therefore at times quite annoying to someone that may be familiar with the rules French, German, etc. phonetics.

ok, how long do these bot holidays last?

They're supposed to end at midnight, but it seems like you have to log out and back in after midnight to make the switch. That's what I just did, and it worked.