This is a brief tutorial describing how you can create and add knowledge to your robot. A successful robot will give responses that appear to be coming from a human. Your goal as the botmaster is very simple:
«Build content that induces the visitor to carry on conversations with your robot for as long as possible!»
You do this by creating a variety of potential answers to various questions, or re-directing a conversation to new topics that the client finds interesting – always with the goal of continuing the interactions as long as possible.
Examples of such robots can be found at the links below:
The Annual Loebner Contest:
www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html
Most Popular Pandorabots:
www.pandorabots.com/botmaster/en/mostactive
Diva Bot Beauty Pageant:
http://www.international-lisp-conference.org/2002/Competitions/Chatterbots/ILC02-chatterbots.html
Pandorabots allows you to extend the knowledge of your robot via a programming language called AIML. The goal of this tutorial is to teach you the minimum of AIML necessary to make your robot «smarter» and better able to carry on a realistic conversation.
This Tutorial is a draft – and unfortunately has errors and omissions. Better versions will be forthcoming. Some of you will argue that it would have been better to postpone publication – yet the cry for some kind of documentation was just too much. Please accept my apologies for this draft’s roughness. Please mail comments and problems to the attention of Dr. Doubly Aimless at info@pandorabots.com.