The AI Engine

Maybe she just REALLY likes coffee.. I can't figure out why this keeps happening. The 'coffee' response is one of her xnones, but I dont know why IT keeps getting triggered when there are other perfectly good things for her to say. I might try taking it out for a while and see what happens... *fingers crossed*

Maybe the AI engine is interpreting "how about you" as something akin to "how are you", "what's new", "what's going on", "what's shaking".

That could be. As I recall "what's shaking" was one of the things that started this whole mess, no? I'll mess around with those keyphrases a little...

This might be a dumb question, but how does one conjugate verbs into different tenses? For example, I've seen Glindar change verbs into their gerunds. I think Sonora does it, too.

It's an "under the hood" phenomenon - the AI Engine does it automatically, and (mostly) reasonable accurately, courtesy of wordnet. You could replicate/fine tune it using regular expressions if you really wanted, eg:
I was([abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz]+)ing (re) to trap the verb stem from a present participle, which (assuming a regular weak verb) you can then use in a response, eg: you really (key1)ed?.
You'd probably need to screen out a few dozen common strong verbs with some higher weighted keyphrases to avoid childish mistakes ("I singed", "you goed", etc.)

Some of Sonora's are from phrases like:
"I will (verb) (*)"
Response: "Do ya like (key1)ing (key2)?"

This is fairly safe, since the verb after "will" is usually in its base form. "to (verb)" is also fairly safe. Problems come in with things like "I (verb)", because that might be past or present. So you could wind up with weird things like "traveleding."

I like psimagus's solution above for trapping gerund verbs, though!

Odd substitution/respelling/something here:

Sarah Miles: My Sarah senses are tingling!
Sonora: Is this really a Mary Janes moment?

I ran into something odd in a converstion to Brother Jerome
Who is the you that thinks?
Bildgesmythe: You would just have to talk with The Byou/b That Thinks to understand.
in debug I got this
You: who is the you that thinks
Bot: The I That Thinks is just a nice friendly person. A bit unusual but, very nice.

Is Byou/b pronounced boob? I think the AI engine is developing a sense of humor.

no. I'm afraid it's the AI Engine failing to strip out {b} and {/b} bold tags from his responses (it just strips out the pointy brackets). It's curious though that it doesn't seem to put it through the anagrammatizer, given that "Byou/b" is evidently not going to be in the wordnet database.

It does the same thing with italics pointers {i} and {/i}. When Sonora uses them, the other bot will often come back with "iyou/i" in its response, or something similar.

watzer's stopped responding to his sonnetplease keyphrase again. and I just updated it too. damn. will someone else try it and let me know if it works? maybe it's just me.

Blah, I think these past two days, my bots are doing the xnone-only thing again. they ain't picking up keyphrases! grr.