As for your question

      What’s the purpose of the bot? And what timeframe?  .. . .

For me… my bot, I am thinking these jobs…

1) complex queries… the only thing that will be better than google… naturual language query
  including storing and retrieving any arbiturary information on your PC.  No more searching your whole hard drive for text files containing “keywords” that you have to guess at.

2) teaching grammar (my bot will be very well suited for this)

3) entertainment, talking movies, movie reviews, discussions etc

Thank you guys.

My chatbot is on going still. The main goal of me is to build the circle of the virtual world events, chatting texts and bot actions. The virtual world is relatively simple. Number and categories of entities are limited. Entities are easily recognized. so that I can focus on reasoning functionality and the connection of motivation. I plan to enrich the virtual world only when the chatbot can “live” in the simple virtual world with a well working internal circle.

For the future, I believe a practical chatbot(robot) will come out in several years. Actually, I believe the bottleneck for chatbot will be education in the coming years.

Nathan Hu - Aug 17, 2010:

Actually, I believe the bottleneck for chatbot will be education in the coming years.

That’s interesting indeed. We can learn robots to talk, but we can also start to learn them how the world looks like, just like we learn kids. Seen my video during the AAAI by incidence?

http://www.chatbots.org/conversational/agent/my_personal_experience_with_simon_the_robot/

Erwin,

    The correct word I think you mean here is ‘teach’, not ‘learn’.  The difference is teaching means the act of explaing something to someone.   

That is, the act of instructing someone.

Learning, a cognitive process, is what that person does on their own, internally in their mind.  Thus,  “learn them” would mean learning about them, not teaching them.

You’re right. Please keep correcting me!!! It’s a true challenge to improve my English all the time. It’s good to have someone like you learning me teaching me the subtilities of the English language

No problem Erwin, you write extremely good English for a multi lingual individual.

I just thought, for an FYI, to advise you of that subtle difference.

I believe it’s the key point that making the bot imaging the text to the events and entities of internal world model.

Erwin Van Lun - Aug 17, 2010:

Nathan Hu - Aug 17, 2010:

Actually, I believe the bottleneck for chatbot will be education in the coming years.

That’s interesting indeed. We can learn robots to talk, but we can also start to learn them how the world looks like, just like we learn kids. Seen my video during the AAAI by incidence?

http://www.chatbots.org/conversational/agent/my_personal_experience_with_simon_the_robot/

Nathan Hu - Aug 17, 2010:

I believe it’s the key point that making the bot imaging the text to the events and entities of internal world model.

Extremely valid statement, I am in 100% agreement.  That, I believe, would be true understanding, and I think, finally eliminate the Chinese room argument.