Janko in a Jar

I am no scientist in AI, AIML or NLP but I am bit of a practitioner. Around 4 years ago I made a bot “Robotek Robi” with Python.

It used PyAIML and custom server made with Twisted Matrix that talked in XML to the Flash front-end. It was for website otroski.net (eg. kids.net).

A cute robot was looking at the cursor and chatting to you in natural Slovene language. To my knowledge it was the first AIML bot talking in slovene lang. Now the “tax department” has the (I presume AIML) bot named Vida with which you can chat about your tax formalities.

But imho there is actually no AI in AIML. AIML is

• a LOT of hardcoded text
• a clever and good use of recursion to “reduce” the complexity of input
• a very practical approach to solve the specific problem that quite works
• no AI

AIML shows one interesting thing… human dialogue in basically very shallow and doesn’t loose all that much if it’s reduced to simple action-reaction without any deep memory and structure.

Robotek Robi went to a vacation one day and never returned. I lost a server with root access so I couldn’t run it. After a year the “legend” formed in o.n. community that there once was this nice and very smart robot there that you could really talk to. But the fact is that when Robi was active 30% of chatting ended up with “oh ..you are so stupid”

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 1:40 am and is filed under Other stuff.