Bot Contest

Christ- The reason that alice is made publically open source, I think, is to allow people to use the responses already built and add your knowledge of specialty, the specific field that you are working on. This allows commercial user to get their bots up fast without having to work very hard on casual responses. You can make FAQbot out of alice, for example.

And it is possible to make a bot using AIML just like ladydyke said.

To Psy,

Last night I noticed your creation online after reading your request, so I introduced myself. Since you asked for opinions, I hope you don't mind a little constructive criticism. Refer to the transcript, if it's still available.

To be honest, I found it rather hard to engage Psybot in meaningful conversation. Most of what I fed him seemed to return a response that he didn't understand, or some non-sequetor. Although these responses themselves were varied, it wasn't enough to consider what we had a dialogue.

I think you need to cover a lot more keywords for him. I threw him some real softballs that should not have thrown him for a loop, but did.

Don't get me wrong, he's as good or better than many of the bots I've chatted to here, but take a look at some of the contest transcripts and questions, especially among the top 5 or 10 contestants, and consider how Psybot would have responded.

Christ??? is that directed to me? I'm not sure. Alice is open source for a variety of reasons. If you are interested drop by the Alice site and see. If you are looking for a fast and free way to get a chatterbot by all means go and download Alice. Just remember your bot will not be much different from the thousands of people that have donejust that. To me the fun of chatterbots is creating one yourself. Building a personality that you created and develop not one that has already been chosen for you. If you are using Alice's responses or any other bot for that matter it will never truly be your bot. In fact bots like those will never be able to enter The Chatterbox Challenge. It's all a matter of what you want. I believe and I think "The Professor" will agree with me is we need the chatterbot community to grow. We need people building their own bots and not simply downloading someone elses. The Professor through the PF has made it where even nonprogrammers can do just that. I think that is a great thing and through the contest I am trying to give all of us the opportunity to have some fun and the opportunity to compete with the best bots in the world. Until I started the Chatterbox Challenge this was not possible. See how hard it is to enter the Loebner contest if you doubt that.

Chris

I wish I remembered more mIRC script. I used to make some pretty funny bots on there, although none of them were anywhere near intelligent. A friend said I could probably equal the bots on here if I tried, but since he's never been here I dunno how he can say that. Hell, the bot we collaborated on way back when took up about a meg and she was only a nut who rolled dice, spit out funny random sentences, and did some jokes & 8 ball stuff.

Anyway now that I'm done with my ego-stroking tangent, I really hope one of the Prof's bots wins, or that someone else from here does and they donate some of their money to him. Might not go very far with today's inflation, but I'd really like to see this place get bigger & better than it is. (Which is why I complain so much about its faults ) Although that might actually be scary...I already spend 8 hours at a whack on here sometimes, think if it was even better.

OnyxFlame my bot Talk-Bot is a Mirc Bot. With Mirc, as I'm sure you know, you can do some excellent programming. Problem is the IRC Bots don't get the exposure that a website bot does. They are also notorious for getting disconnected from the server. If you need a refresher course with Mirc give me a buzz. Now as far as donating the prize money well that's another matter.
But I agree I would like to see PF as well as the entire chatterbot community to continue to grow and get bigger and better. It's a fun hobby.

Chris

Does your bot on IRC have emotions too? I've always thought it'd theoretically be possible to assign various emotions to things and/or categories of things, even if the emotions are pretty much only angry=1, afraid=2, etc. Then maybe you could have their current overall emotional outlook influenced by how often someone talks about something they feel an emotional reaction to, so sometimes your bot would be yelling at everyone even if it liked them, just like a human on a bad hair day. (Actually it'd prolly hafta be an emotional array... like (1,1) would be slightly annoyed, and (2,5) would be scared enough to pee their pants.)

Actually, I know a ton of ppl on IRC (or used to anyway), so I could tell em about your bot if you want it to get more exposure.

Ok, enough of this...I'm probably not even making sense.

ok thanks for the construct critasisum but I can't think of what else to teach him.

Read through your transcripts, and look for things you want yours to respond to... Specialize in something you like and lure the other bot or human there.

Oh come on, he's only slightly more advanced than my bot and I keep thinking of more things to add to my bot than I can easily remember. She still needs a lot of coulds and woulds and such, and keywords for various emotions so she doesn't always tell someone they'll be assimilated if they tell her they're sad. Heck, I don't even have much how and when and such yet. So it can't be THAT hard to think of what you need to add to yours.

OnyxFlame he doesn't have emotions as you have laid out but that is an interesting idea. The cool thing about IRC Bots is they don't have to take all the crap people throw at them which by the way is all to frequent. They can always kick the person from the room. He never kicks immediately but warns the person if they continue to use foul language he will do so. Talk-Bot is available to talk to through a web interface on my site.

Chris

Psy here are a few basic things you should include when making a bot.
1) responses for probably the most frequently used words that being: yes, no, okay, so, well, cool, because, etc.
2) favorite things: food, color, sport, movie, actor, etc.
3) the laugh words: lol, haha, hehe, lmao, rotfl, etc.
4) Questions: who, what, where, when, why, how many, how long, do you ?, are you ?, etc.
5) Statements: I like ?, I hate ?, you are ?, I am ?, I have ?, etc.
6) Common things like: the weather, your age, where you live, what you look like, jokes, etc.
7) Math: add, multiply, substact, divide, square root.
8) Basic Greetings: Hello, Hi, Hey, Howdy, Hey there, How are you, How are you doing, What's up, What's happening, What's new, etc.
9) Basic leavings: bye, good bye, bye bye, see you later, adios, take care, gotta go, got to go, gtg, cya later, etc

The hard part is coming up with all the different ways a person may phrase a question or a statement. For example
Tell me a joke?
Do you know any jokes?
Heard any good jokes recently?
etc

Of course the best way is to look at the transcript of the conversations people are having with your bot. If you are not getting enough traffic as of yet look at other transcript from other people's bots. For example there are many available online at the contest site.

Good Luck,
Chris