Can someone point me to a bibliography of introductory tutorials, videos, books, or whatever is out there for an absolute beginner with chatscript?

I’ve scanned posts in this forum and found references to “the manual” or “chatscript-tutorial” but don’t want to start in the wrong direction with obsolete documentation that I manage to stumble upon with web-search.

Where should I begin?

In my case I have a background in programming multiple languages, including the usual 3GL’s, expert systems, LISP, and a little Prolog.  I know XML.  I’ve had courses in A.I., though none in Natural Language Programming.   

Is there a primer or purchasable e-book that’s relatively current?  Reading the comments I feel a little like I just got one of them new-fangled IBM “computers”, turned it on, and got a “C:” prompt.  I’m missing the whole general context and the first ten worked examples,  description of syntax,  etc. 

Thank you!

Hi Wade,

it seems like you are working on the same field like Dough:

http://www.chatbots.org/ai_zone/viewthread/1037/

For me, the best way to jump into ChatScript was to

read first Erels “Tutorial” and after that Bruces “User Manual”,

which you can find here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/chatscript/files/

and than testing again and again.

Welcome by

Andreas

> http://www.meta-guide.com/home/ai-engine/chatscript

I’ve started a Meta Guide webpage on “ChatScript” (above link), where I’m trying to centralize resources to better understand it myself.

What I would really like to see are more VIDEOS; simple narrated screencasts are fine.  What I’m particularly interested in seeing are installation procedures, especially mounting on remote servers (something like Heroku or AppEngine for instance).  Also, anything about an API, for instance setting up a web API for ChatScript.

Andreas,  thank you!

It’s just taking me a little time to establish context here, which I’m belaboring below in the hope of improving the signage along this pathway for those newbies who follow.

Thanks for the link to Doug’s thread as well. He seems to be aiming at medical students with a high-end, high-fidelity patient, probably at the bedside.    I’m working with nursing educators aiming for a much more limited set of patient debriefing case studies, with a prototype AIML chatbot being trained now on the web (SitePal) and in Second Life (via SmartBots), probably sitting in the chair in an exam room or patient-education conference room.

I think we’ll converge as interdisciplinary communication practice (among medical students, nurses, nutritionists, social workers, pharmacists,  patients, and patient families) is a hot subject right now and for at least the next decade.

I did also discover “How to create your own customized chatbot for beginners - Chatbots 101” in this forum by
Dave Morton :  http://www.chatbots.org/ai_zone/viewthread/492/  that has a section on Chatscript. (which recommends reading the manual, of course.)

So, I’m off to read the manual, and later to try to determine who has written third-party packages (“Advanced Bot Framework”?)  that can move me more from “programming in vi or notepad” to some large pre-assembled chunks, editors,  integrated development environments, or whatever else is layered upon the core Chatscript framework.

Notes follow, probably mostly for me,  on underbrush in the pathway to get this far for a total newbie or anyone else I send this way and tell them “this is easy, you can’t miss it.”

It took me a little while to determine that Erel’s “Tutorial” and   Bruce’s “User Manual” you refer to are the same documents titled “Chatscript Tutorial.pdf” and “Chatscript User Manual.pdf” in the DOCUMENTATION folder that downloads with Chatscript-2.93.zip from   http://sourceforge.net/projects/chatscript/  .  (I’m downloading to a Windows 7 machine in a Bootcamp partition on a Mac, which worked fine the first time.)

On that SourceForge page,  there were also prominent suggestions that I might be interested in the “Recommended Projects” of Avanced Bot Framework,  Program O, and Program E.    A quick glance determined (so far) that Program O and Program E are AIML, and not of immediate interest.  I don’t know yet about Advanced Bot Framework, and put it on a “maybe later” list.

Hi there, Wade, and welcome to chatbots.org!

As a member of the ChatScript dev team (though admittedly with a very minor role), it’s my job to make sure that the main page for ChatScript (http://chatscript.sourceforge.net/) is up to date, including all of the documentation. We just put up a new version this morning, and one of the files was an updated version of the user’s manual. You can view all of the current documentation at http://chatscript.sourceforge.net/Documentation/ which links to not only the user’s manual, but also every other bit of documentation that’s ‘officially’ available (and there’s a lot!)

As to my article that you’ve mentioned, I wrote that back when ChatScript was more or less “just starting out”, popularity-wise, and at some future point, I’m going to have to re-visit and revise the entire article, I think. A lot has happened since then.

> http://sourceforge.net/projects/bot-framework/

Any idea who the “crazy_chris” is behind “Advanced Bot Framework” (Last Update: 2009) ??

Hi.  I was reading Erel’s tutorial that was in the 2.93 version (current) and it seems to stop in the middle of something. Is it supposed to end on page 18 as follows:?

>>  Knowledge (^createfact, table:)
>>  Our previous bot could understand what the user wants, but it couldn’t really help him
>>  reach his goal because it had no knowledge of transportation means. We can give our bot
>>  some knowledge by creating facts