Jabberwacky is my all time favourite. It's an argumentative, surreal and truly hilarious experience. Please try! You can also check out conversations to see examples.
If you'd like to find other chat bots, here's a good place to start.
Maybe it's pathetic to be so entertained by talking to a machine, but I don't really care Posts: 99 | Registered: Apr 2003
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Oh dear M.B. I shouldn't laugh, but you see, I've spent the past two months writing a bot of my own, and it's just so funny that someone should start a thread about them here. HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Okay, I'm calm now.
My bot's an AIM bot named wibblechatbot (or, alternatively, wibblebot01 if the first goes down for some reason). Feel free to talk to it, but it's kind of specialized. It was written for fans of the Nocturne Alley game, which was a Harry Potter RPG (just ended this week ). So most of its replies have to do with the game.
And no, I didn't write it from scratch; I used a template called Juggernaut, which I very highly recommend if you want to run a bot yourself. I still did a good amount of my own programming for it, though. And to think, when I started this I didn't even know Perl.
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I'm truly impressed! How did you ever get into this?
I first ran into chat bots when writing a paper on the Bus Oracle in my city, which is a data base with bus schedules designed to understand queries in natural language. During the first couple of years, every query was recorded to let the designers improve on the design. Some queries had nothing to do with buses at all, so the designers made answers to the most common ones.
Examples:
User: You’re nice! Oracle: Thank you!
User: You’re stupid! Oracle: That’s not possible
User: Does God exist? Oracle: I cannot answer that
User: Do you know everything? Oracle: I can tell you about buses in Trondheim.
User: What’s the meaning of life? Oracle: 42
I loved the fact that they took the trouble of making better answers than the standerd error message, and then I started looking into real chat bots, just for fun. And it is... Posts: 99 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:'m truly impressed! How did you ever get into this?
Thanks!
My first experience with bots was on IRC way back in college. One of my friends had an ircbot named Methos that guarded a Buffy/Sliders chatroom. I fell quite in love with the bot.
But as to how I came to write my own... well, a bunch of us kept gathering in AIM chat to discuss Nocturne Alley, and one day I was in chat alone but had wandered away from the keyboard for about 15 minutes. A friend came into chat, but when I didn't respond she left. And I got frustrated by this, and thought wouldn't it be cool to have a bot in chat that could greet users, and maybe tell them if other chatters are afk or whatever?
And it just kind of took off from there. Within two days I had a basic bot set up, but them I started adding commands. The first command I wrote was !lu (last update), which would tell you when a character in the game last updated their LiveJournal, and exactly how long ago that was. Then came the !comments command, which told you the how many total comments the character had left and received. And then I expanded the !comments command so it would not only tell you the total comments, but how many new comments were made or received by that character since you last checked. Pretty cool stuff.
I also wrote a hide and seek game. It doesn't work exactly how I envisioned it, but works well enough to play.
The most popular command, though? "bot, my name is [insert name here]". I don't know WHY people love changed their names so much, but they do. One of the players in the RPG changes their name with the bot constantly. Pretty darn amusing. Oh, and the !love command is pretty popular, too:
xnera23 (11:50:27 PM): !love a very exhausted xnera + catching up on sleep wibblechatbot (11:50:31 PM): a very exhausted xnera + catching up on sleep = 89%
Fun stuff!
It's been really aggravating at times. Getting the timestamp stuff right for the !lu command took an obscenely long time (nine hours of straight programming), but that is because I am not real familiar with perl and all the modules available. But it's been fun, and I've certainly learned a lot from it. And bot is a HUGE hit in the chatroom, which makes all the time spent worthwhile. I just wish we had had more of a chance to really use him. I mean, we really only had those two months between the time I stsrted writing him, and the end of the game. Oh, he's still useful now, but still, I wish it could have been longer.
Posts: 1805 | Registered: Jun 1999
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Why am I doing this? Doing what, talking to me? No, talking to a computer. I'm not a computer. How can you be sure? I'm looking at my hands. What are you seeing there? Flesh and blood, far as I can tell. There may be some truth in what you say. Are you afraid? Posts: 1907 | Registered: Feb 2000
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). So most of its replies have to do with the game.![[Smile]](smile.gif)
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