The nice people at pandorabots.com offer free, trainable, AIML-based bots. Aren't they nice?

AIML is Artificial Intelligence Markup Language - a subset of XML, allowing associative definition of question/response and pattern-based chat

The botmaster console allows you to manage your many bots [well, yes, when this screen grab was taken there was only 1].

As far as I can tell, there is no stated limit on the number of bots you can have.

Pandora offers a few basic flavours of bot, I have only experimented with a few - for this character I decided to start with a blank bot. Give it a name, press create and you are ready to start teaching your bot stuff.

The different flavours determine what AIML markup your bot starts with - some are very chatty and rich, others appear confused, still others arrive tabla-rasa [empty headed]

The basic steps [as I have encountered them, so far] are:

1. define bot properties
2. train it with specific content
3. publish it so it can be contacted in the outside world.

Properties are things about itself that the bot knows. In the pictured example, I have added a property called "age", so that when a chatter asks "how old are you" it will access this property.

I am still learning what to include as properties and what to include as general chatter in the conversation training [later].

there seems no logical limit to the complexity here, and if you create an odd property that it cannot connect with you can always tweak it's response later in the trainng interface.

When training a bot, you type the thing you might say to the bot - it will search it's conversation database looking for "matches" to all or part of what you said, and respons accordingly.

Because I started with a blank bot, it does not know how to respond to anything much at all. this is where it then becomes time consuming but interesting.

The training interface indicates how truly blank my bot is initially. When I mention a key question to it "what is evidence", it has NO IDEA what I am talking about.

It's standard response is "I have no answer for that".

By entering questions and responses, you "teach" the bot stuff, presumably later the more you talk to it, the more connections it makes to that response.

This screen demonstrates that the bot has now learnt that bit of knowledge.

Digging into it's AIML brain, the markup that has occurred is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<aiml version="1.0">
<category>
<pattern>WHAT IS EVIDENCE</pattern>
<template>Evidence is what will tell us the story of what really happened</template>
</category>
</aiml>

this is also fairly useful programatically, as the above markup can also be generated by server-side web services like alicebot.com, from locally hosted PHP/MySQL Databases, which in itself is a neat way to control your content without relying on third-party external services.

We now have a live-to-web bot. Talk to him:

http://www.pandorabots.com/pandora/
talk?botid=9aee3bcfde36c2ec

or see and talk to the flash-interfaced [Oddcast VHost] bot at:

http://demo.vhost.pandorabots.com/pandora/
talk-oddcast?botid=9aee3bcfde36c2ec

The "botID" is important here - as it is the Pandora-specific Unique Identifier used later.

A video tutorial that almost, but not entirely, fails to adequately describe very much useful at all - pity really as this is almost the only documentation available from Thoys.

It does, however, address visually the process of associating the bot to an alternative avatar's account, and hints at a command set you issue to your bot in-world via instant message to it.

r-clicking on the tray icon brings up a menu that lets you initiate the remote login process - choose ADD CLIENT.

this menu also lets you switch between the bots [yes, apparently you can have many bots in at the same time - yet to test this]

You can hold conversations with anyone in talking distance, without being in-world. A truly useful feature would be the ability to IM people also, but that is not available yet.

Similarly, with the inventory not active, remotely teleporting and other things are not accessible. this necessitates the puppet master being in-world to get the ALT avatar to do much more than speak.

By wiring the ALT avatar to your pre-prepared Pandora AIML Bot, that avatar has fulll control over the pre-programmed vocabulary. This is where it starts to get interesting, as the avatar is live in world, and can be talked to as though it is a person, it looks like a person and can be dressed appropriately.

This has real potential to be useful I think as an in-world expert when real people are not available.

So we come to the wierd [yet strangely wonderful] part of the project - with Me in world [the handsome grey thin alienesque chappie in the tweed suit - it was late, and I was tired] with my Doppelganger [the muscle-bound hunk of spunk], I can issue commands to get him to do stuff.

Pictured are me dancing with myself [nigel no-friends?] and simultaneously having a chat, with the response from Doppy coming from the AIML Pandora Bot made previously.

There is something slightly surreal about this scenario, particularly as my doppelganger dances better than I do, but exploring the command set, there seems some commands that work better than others. I have summarized the command list below, but have found some of them do not yet work - I can hope this is still in development as I see HUGE potential should it ever stabilise.

This is an in-world demo of Me with my BOT, dancing with myself [yes, I realise just how sad that sounds].

It demonstrates some of the abilities of the Bot to converse using the Pandora Chat engine, and obey instructions Instant Messaged to it.

as I get commands to work, I will annotate the above table.