Discovering Chat Bots

What is a Chat Bot? Read about them here or here.

What is the Turing Test? Who was Turing?

How is the Turing Test related to artificial intelligence? Do you believe that passing the Turing Test is convincing evidence of artificial intelligence?

What is the Loebner Prize?
http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html

What does A.L.I.C.E. stand for?

You can talk to "Alice" here. Click on the animated Bot and you will go to a chat with her.

Human: You are pretty good!
ALICE: Thanks you are a nice person, unknown person.
Human: What is your URL?
ALICE: My URL is http://www.alicebot.org.
Human: Thanks!
ALICE: Don't mention it.

Many Chatbots are listed at chatbots.org

For what purposes are chatbots being used or planned for?

Try talking to ELIZA. What do you think about ELIZA? Tell me about your conversation. What was the purpose of ELIZA? Do you think the software is effective at it?

These bots are related to ELIZA. Try?

How is Jabberwocky different from other artificial intelligence chat-bots?

George, from jabberwacky, won the 2005 Loebner prize for the most human chat bot. You can talk to George…

I'm not like all the rest.
Are you OK?
I am fine, thanks :)).

Or talk to Joan…

You cannot talk to God on the internet, but you can chat with a chatbot called iGod.

Human: Baka yaro!
God: Do you have any idea what I am talking about?
Human: No
God: Me either :-).

The newest and best chatbot is Elbot. What did Elbot do in October 2008?

What is Artificial Solutions?

What is a "virsona"?

An educational chatbot is Abraham Lincoln!

Simon Laven has a great list of chatbots, well-organized by type, with a good, simple explanation of each.
http://www.simonlaven.com/
His site includes some non-English bots.

I like Egon, a chatbot for learning English. Egon is a pizza-loving dragon AI. 

The Personality Forge is a site where users design different personalities for their bots. Here is a list of some of their hits. Be careful! Some of these bots are dangerous!

There is another list of Chat-bots at botspot, and here are some more from Google Directory, and AI Dreams.

You may find some other Open-Source chat-bots listed here:

You can chat with humans on the web, too!

October 16 Class Notes

Today our scheduled task was to begin Knowledge of Self activities. These include finding out about your learning style, your personality type, and your career aptitude by completing several online questionnaires. It is a way of using the internet as a kind of mirror for self-discovery.

I have had to delay these activities because I had only received 3 students' blog links! It is important for you to send the link to me because I need to see your blog in order to know that it exists. If I can see your blog, I can evaluate your participation in the course. Without the link, I do not know if you are doing anything. Many of the projects we do in this class will become posts on your blog. The blog is a kind of notebook or portfolio for you to keep and display what you have been doing. 

It's a little funny, too, because when I walked around and talked to you, everybody seemed to be working on it, so I wasn't worried, but the e-mails never arrived. Hello? 

You can send the URL or "link" to your blog to me using e-mail, or you can send it by clicking on the COMMENT button on the bottom of this post or any of my posts. When you comment on my class blog, it sends an e-mail to me. You can control this (comment moderation, e-mail notification) for your own blog in your Preferences.  

As I write this, only 7 students have been able to create a blog and send the link to me. These seven are listed in the sidebar of the class blog. If you are unable to complete the task, the class will go on, but you will have received a zero for the two class periods of work. If your blog does not appear there, please e-mail me again. 

Please experiment with using your blog. You can try a different blogging platform, as I suggested, and write to compare the two. You can experiment with the layout and design of your blog. Maybe you want to add a custom header. Try changing the font or font size in your header. Upload images or embed YouTube videos. Look at other students' blogs listed on the right to get more ideas. Some have added daily sunsets, calendars, pictures they took, and other features. 

Some students have uploaded a photo to use as a profile picture, and added a short profile. This is good, but you do not have to give your age, your birthday, or your e-mail address if you do not want to. You should be careful to remember that the blog is public, so do not write anything there that you would not write in some other public place. There will probably not be many visitors to your site, however, so do not be too afraid or paranoid. If you use Wordpress you can see daily stats automatically (how many visitors to your site, etc) but if you want to do this on Blogger, you need to take some extra steps. 

It may be a good idea to link your blog back to this blog or to other student blogs. The Blogroll Widget in Blogger is a very convenient way to do this. That is how I added the student blog links ("feed") that you see on the right side. 

Blogging Task

Today is the day for starting a blog. As we said in class, a blog could be like a notebook, journal, diary, a place to do some writing, or it could even be a place for your photographs and movies or movies that you would like to link to. The easiest blogging platform to use is Blogger. Another site is Wordpress.com. There are several others, too.

First, make your blog at Blogger. (If you have already made a blog at Blogger, go in to it to refresh it, make some new posts, and make another blog at Wordpress.com. Then you will be able to compare the two services.)

When you have made your blog, tell me about it. There are three ways you could do that.
1. Send me an e-mail with the URL of your blog in it. For example, this blog is at http://i-e-e-p.blogspot.com/
2. You could send an INVITE or Notice to me from inside Blogger. Send it to my Bunkyo e-mail account. (That way you do not have to sign in to your e-mail.)
3. You could tell me about the blog that you have made by posting a COMMENT on this post! (It's also faster if you don't want to sign in to your e-mail.)

There are many things you can do in your blog that are not possible with a physical notebook. Your blog is weightless, so you do not have to carry it around. Many people can read it, but if you don't want many people to read it, you can control who sees it. For example, you could limit it to only people who are members of Blogger. You can insert hyperlinks to most of the world's information and insert pictures and movies. You can also change the color of text, italic, bold, change the font, and so on. You can add your own header (banner image) and customize the sidebar with "widgets". I have added a poll, clocks, and a game of Hangman to the sidebar of this blog. If you are good with HTML or CSDS, you can customize the coding of your blog to make it more individualistic and unique.

Please help others with the task if they are having trouble!

As an advanced task, make another blog at Wordpress.com. How is it different? Use it and find out. Let me tell you some advantages of Wordpress. Wordpress has more storage, 3GB compared to 1GB for Blogger. Wordpress gives you a word count as you are typing. Wordpress has a calendar that looks very nice. Wordpress allows you to upload Microsoft Word DOC files, PDF files, and even your own MP3 files, so if you are making a music blog, you would want to use Wordpress. One advantage of Blogger is that you can edit the HTML and CSS. You cannot do that in WOrdpress unless you pay extra money.

For an even more advanced task, try to make a blog which is readable on a cell phone. Make a Tumblr blog. Make a bilingual blog, with 2 languages in two columns! Only your imagination and perseverence can limit you.

Update: I created a copy of this blog by importing it into Wordpress. What do you think? Do you like Wordpress or Blogger better? http://ieep.wordpress.com/

Another update: You can read about some other blogging services here.