Hi all

I wrote a book all about my dating misadventures. Reminds me of Larry Laffer from Leisure Suit Larry, looking for love in all the wrong places. I am sure most of us have been there.

I called my book “Kill Me Now” and my website is aptly called http://killmenow.org

I also write a blog about dating. But of course, my main idea is to get people to buy my book (from Amazon).

What I am looking for is that when someone reaches my site, I want to welcome him or her and point them to my blog, my trailer and my sample chapter. Hopefully they will also buy my book.

No idea how to start. Can anyone help?

Lawrence

> http://acobot.com/

Lawrence, what you need is an automated Acobot popup “chatbox”, the quickest and easiest solution for you.  FYI, you ought to downgrade the vanity pic of yourself to an “About” page, and consider just a headshot, though it certainly gives the immediate impression of “hair-raising dates”.  ;^)

Hi Marcus

This is a Wordpress template and I would not consider it a vanity picture, but if I only added a headshot, it would be large as I have no control over that. I had considered putting my book there but it was recommended to me to leave as is.

I will look into acobat. Thanks

> http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/acobot/

Well, you’re in luck; Acobot offers a dedicated Wordpress plugin.

Not sure I see any relevance to AI and chatbots here.

Why not just design your website with the sample chapter, put a link to the Amazon sales page and links to whatever else you want the user to see?

Truthfully, Steve, I don’t really see much relevance, either, but I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt. I just didn’t have the ‘fortitude’ to jump in and ask the necessary questions. Sadly, I still have the occasional ‘bad day’.

Lawrence, if it’s some sort of “virtual tour guide” that you want for your site, or just about any other type of AI driven assistant, there are going to be some things to consider right off the bat, such as the exact role that you want this assistant to play, what sort of balance you want between conversation and information, level of sophistication (do you want the bot to “follow” the visitor from one page on your site to the next?), etc. Also, do you want just a text-based assistant, or will you need to have some sort of avatar, as well? Another thing to consider is how much you’re willing to pay for all of this. It’s information of this sort that will help us to point you in the right direction; without it, we’d just be guessing.

It seems like an advert for his book rather than anything AI related but hopefully I will be proved wrong.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

Dave, thank you for your comment. I was looking for a virtual tour guide that would point someone in the path that I want them to take. I did install acobat as suggested, but I found that I did not like the text box type. It also looked bad on the iPhone.

I have looked at SitePal.

My idea is that when someone lands on my blog, I kind of point them to my sample chapter and then try to point them to where they can purchase.

I am in no way trying to advertise my book here, but that is life and if I hurt Steve’s feelings, sorry.

Hurt Steve’s feelings? Are you kidding me? Look Lawrence, we get plenty of spammers here (like most forums) and frankly your initial post seemed more like an attempt to play with PageRank rather than an honest interest in integrating a chatbot into your website. That was my impression, at any rate.

However, if that is not the case, I do look forward to seeing what solution you put together. SitePal offers great features, but can be pricey if I’m not mistaken. Steve would be a great guy to talk to about integrating an AIML-based bot. The AIML mark-up language is excellent for putting together a customized bot quickly and with minimal programming. You could even design a bot around a character in your book, for example, which could be fun for visitors. Or one that could answer questions about you, your book, dating, etc.

So Steve, you want to guide me? My character is myself and I refer to myself as the Bigfoot

Lawrence, you didn’t hurt my feelings at all and I apologise if your request is genuine.

I would advise a look at http://www.pandorabots.com where you can quickly create a bot from a template and then fill in the details such as name, age, location etc of your character. Are you wantng people to talk to this thing or for it just to suggest things such as, “Thanks for stopping by. Do you want to read a sample of my book?”

It seems like your suggested text is exactly what I am looking for. I will check the site

Just as an aside, you have some nice reviews on Amazon, I think you would be wise to cash in on those, link to them somehow - maybe you did already but I couldn’t see it.

Good luck with the bot, if you go for an AIML bot then Steve is certainly your man.

All the best