I want to introduce David to you. He is not yet a real chatbot - you can’t have a conversation with him but he can do some interesting things:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
you find him here: http://askdavid.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

David is part of my product reviews site and here’s what he does:

When you use the search form, he tries to give you contextual information.

e.g. you search for “chatbot”: http://askdavid.com/search/chatbot
He will give you a definition of what a chatbot is. What you get is Wikipedia’s definition.

In the search result click on the first entry (Book: A Corpus Based Approach to Generalising a Chatbot System). On the product page: http://askdavid.com/item/3844387064 he will give you a description of the book. This is the author’s description of the book and taken from Amazon.com

Let’s say the user searches for “Harry Potter collection”: http://askdavid.com/search/Harry-Potter-collection
Since there is no Wikipedia page for “Harry Potter collection”, David will tell you something that is related to the search term. In this case he tells you who J.K. Rowling is.

Since there are more than 1000 results for this search he will also instruct you what to do: “Please add more keywords to your search to narrow down the results”

Bruce Wilcox has a wikipedia page, so David will tell you that he is an ai programmer: http://askdavid.com/search/Bruce-Wilcox

I have predefined certain actions for David and then invoke them via JavaScript. I use this in the following ways:

example: http://askdavid.com/reviews/book/parenting/1864
* When you move your mouse over the book cover David will look in this direction.
* When you click the “make David: smile, wink, angry, sad” links you invoke an action.
* When you move your mouse over the area that says “click to Like, +1 or Tweet this site” David will nod encouragingly.

So what do you think of it? What else could David do? Thank you for your feedback!

Hello, David! And if I missed saying so before, welcome to chatbots.org!

I’ve done some ‘poking around’ with Ask David, and I must say I’m impressed. I think I would call your product more of a virtual assistant than a traditional chatbot (he’s not all that ‘big’ on small talk, after all, but you already mentioned that), but that’s just fine. It (I keep wanting to call it “he”... especially given ‘his’ name ) does the job it was designed to do, the page is visually appealing and engaging, and I enjoyed my time there. All in all, I’d say well done!

Thank you Dave.

>> small talk

I want to integrate that somewhen. However, I’d love to go with ChatScript and I simply don’t have the time to work on a bot from scratch. The idea is to show products in context of the conversation. e.g. When the user mentions “Dire Straits” as his/her favourite band I could show relevant products: http://askdavid.com/search/Dire-Straits

My bot could ask the user about the book he/she last read, then show that books details page and encourage the user to submit a review of it.

When a user gets angry at my bot I could show him these: http://askdavid.com/search/anger-management

Hi David! I love the look of your site, and it definitely did well with my first query: “do robots dream of electric sheep”. I was aiming for the book, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” but couldn’t quite nail the title. David’s speech bubble replied with, “Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep? is an album by blackmail which is a remixed version of their 1999 release, Science Fiction. → Here’s what I found for your search.” The search results began with the book I was looking for.

Which api’s or databases does your bot tap into?

Hi C R,

>> I love the look of your site
I think the site simply looks “different” since it’s not based on a CMS like Wordpress/Drupal but created from scratch.

>> David’s speech bubble replied with [...] The search results began with the book I was looking for.
What David says doesn’t use the same data as the products that are shown for the query. That’s why it’s possible that the speech bubble gave a correct anser AND it found the book you were looking for although the book has a different (but similar) name.

>> Which api’s or databases does your bot tap into?

what David says in the speech bubble

a.) on a products detail page like: http://askdavid.com/reviews/book/contemporary-christian-romance/1997 it’s the product description that is shown on Amazon.com - I am an Amazon Associate and use this api: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/main.html

This is the same api I use to search/display products.

b.) on a search page like http://askdavid.com/search/Do-Androids-Dream-of-Electric-Sheep
This data comes from Wikipedia. MediaWiki, the system used by Wikipedia has an API: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page that I use.