Hi folks,

Firstly let me say that I brand new to this fascinating world of Chatbots, I worked with VoIP and VXML years ago when TTS was boring!

I’m messing with a project at the moment and we are considering adding a general purpose chatbot to a website for some fun interaction with our visitors. I’m particularly interested in pre-loading various facts into the database based on what we know about the user (sex, age, location, browser, operating system, weather at the visitors location etc) so I’m expecting to have to do some coding myself before handing the user to the chatbot.

Initially I’m obviously looking at not spending any or very little money, so open source would be preferred. Anyone got any suggestions?

Chat soon.

Hi, John, and welcome to chatbots.org!

A lot of your options for a chatbot will hinge on what platform(s) you have available on your web server. If your server has PHP and MySQL available to you, I would suggest Program O. If not, then we need to have a bit more information before we can advise you further.

Hi Dave,

I’ve already read your ‘newbie introduction’ - thanks for that, it’s got a lot of useful stuff in there

My server is running ASP/ASP.NET and SQL, I’ve got experiance of PHP/mySQL, but it’s not my prefered language. I suppose it depends on how complicated the code is and my ability to re-write in ASP.  :-o

I’ve downloaded the Program-O ZIP and will have a look. My only concern was that the http://www.program-o.com website seemed to have disappeared so wasnt sure about support/questions?

Thanks for the speedy reply.

Chat soon.

I’ve sent an email to Liz Perreau (Prograo O’s creator) to find out what the deal is with the website, and I hope to hear from her soon. The site has had hosting issues in the past, so I expect that this is just a temporary problem. As soon as I find out anything, I’ll report back. Even without the website, you can still get support for the script, since I’ve been the “lead developer” for several months now. Liz is still the project leader, but I’ve been doing the lion’s share of coding and support. (not bragging, mind)

Anyway, I’ll let you know what I find.

I just heard from Liz, and it seems that there was a billing SNAFU with the domain registration. It’s all been sorted out, so the site should be back up within the hour.

In the mean-time, I also did a bit of “constructive Googling”, and found that Microsoft has a tool for Visual Studio that “helps” convert PHP to ASP.net version 1.(?) - You can find a page about it here. The page states that it “does not make the conversion process completely automatic, but it will speed up your project by automating some of the steps required for migration.” So if you would like to port Program O over to ASP.net, I’d be more than happy to assist. Just use the “E-mail Dave” link below my avatar image, and we’ll continue that aspect of this discussion privately.