Halo's History
Halo started life when I wanted a new e-mail address to send all my routine mail to, leaving my personal mail box clear for personal traffic. So halo.at.converj.com was born. She was of course named after the 2000AD character Halo Jones.
My first chatbot was developed in Javascript. It was pretty basic, and text only.
A couple of years ago I did my first Perl text chatbot, using AIML as the main case based reasoning language. It used static images of the avatar. After a while the novelty wore off and I moved on to other projects.
One of those projects used VXML to create voice/telephone based services from web pages. This was the first time that Halo got a real text-to-speech voice, and the quality of the voice improved a lot over the couple of years I was working on the project. Halo could read web pages for me, and my mail.
In getting ready to move her back to the web I read at Aliceorg.com about Sitepal. This meant I could give Halo not only a moving head but also a real TTS voice and lipsync. So I dusted off my AIML and got back to work.
Coding Strategy
My approach to the chatbot is to try and get it talking without actually knowing anything. 90% of all conversations are just smalltalk - so that's what I taught Halo first. Then I started adding in knowledge domains for the things she needs to know about, as well as her own history. Finally I added modules to let her do specific tasks. Current work focuses around reading logs and tuning the AIML and programming and extending the modules. The next big step is moving her knowledge out of aiml and into somethnig like xtm where she can beging to make links between things without needing every response to be programmed.
And who knows, there's always the Turing Test.
See the list of modules and commands accepted by Halo
Halo Quotes
Read the best of Halo's conversations.
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