Hello everyone!

Firstly, it’s great to be here! As my title states; I am new to chatbots - though I can say that I have encountered them online, but not in a interest level. At any rate, I am now ready to seek this whole world of chatbots - as I believe they are the future.
In short, I am interested in producing a chatbot, with voice recognition or with out - does not matter. However, I want to learn this process accurately and systematically. Can any body point me into a direction where to start as far as, perhaps links to free available softwares that have these capabilities? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance! I will be looking forward to your responses.

Best,
L.Montenegro

Hello Luis, and welcome. 

Before I give you my feedback, my first fundamental question is:  What type of functionality and what purpose do you want to use your bot for?

For example, are you seeking a bot that will help a user find their way around a website?  Current, well known algorithms can handle this.  Or do you wish to develop a bot that can take natural language statements and store them in a database, a kind of natural language search engine.  If this is the case, you’re a very serious bot developer, and you will want to either develop your own algorithms or perhaps combine some existing ones, but with your own ‘twist’.

Or perhaps you are aiming at submitting your entry into the Loebner prize.

Also, 2 other questions before I give my recommendations:

1) How much time, approximate per week can you devote to this project, and for what duration, a few months, years (or like me, decades lol)

2) How much do you like to code?  do you mind it if your code is so complex that you have to spend sometimes countless hours debugging ?  That’s just a heads up!  NLP is probably one of the most complex and demanding branches of computer science.

Hi Victor,

Thank you so much for your feed back! Well, Yes! I will fall into the second category that you mentioned. Essentially, I would like to develop a bot that can hold a conversation and at the same retain memory, habits &  character - maybe I’m over my top. But this is my plan, and I am willing to go the extra to mile to get to this stage. 

Are there any programs or free software, that can assist me in this development?

There is statistical natural language processing software out there, but your best bet is building from scratch, or using built tools as a launching point. Here’s a list of resources aggregated by the Stanford NLP Group: http://nlp.stanford.edu/links/statnlp.html .

Personally, I use WordNet (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/) as a sort of dictionary and thesaurus. There is an implementation of WordNet in the Natural Language Toolkit for python (http://www.nltk.org/). What language are you thinking about working in?

Hello C R Hunt,

Thank you! Well, I’m thinking of the English language to make matters simple. Great, the links seem very extensive. I am starting from “0” I am sure that developing a chatbot requires a series of applications.
I guess now, I have to browse through your links and find the programs and learn how to use them. I have seen, some random Youtube videos of chatbots created - through a series of codes and characters. It’s a strange language to me at this point. But, I’m sure that in due time, I will know all about it.

Thanks again for your links.
p.s. I would greatly appreciate it, if you continue to pop-in and gave me suggestions. Luis

Luis Montenegro - Sep 21, 2010:

Hello C R Hunt,

Thank you! Well, I’m thinking of the English language to make matters simple. Great, the links seem very extensive. I am starting from “0” I am sure that developing a chatbot requires a series of applications.

Ha ha, actually I was wondering which programming language, but both are good questions! Yes, I’m finding that the more I add to my parser, the more I discover there is left to be done. Since most of the parsing algorithms out there are simply statistical, they don’t do that well under the strain of real conversation. That’s where context-based parsing comes in, and where most of your work will lie. At least, that’s what I’ve found.

Luis Montenegro - Sep 21, 2010:

I guess now, I have to browse through your links and find the programs and learn how to use them.

Yes, I’m not personally familiar with most of those codes, so if something interesting catches your eye, do share.

Luis Montenegro - Sep 21, 2010:

I have seen, some random Youtube videos of chatbots created - through a series of codes and characters. It’s a strange language to me at this point. But, I’m sure that in due time, I will know all about it.

Were these bots working with AIML or…?

Luis Montenegro - Sep 21, 2010:

p.s. I would greatly appreciate it, if you continue to pop-in and gave me suggestions.

Sure thing! I only found this forum recently myself, and it’s been great reading about such interesting and varying efforts to tackle chatbot development. Excited to see what you add to the conversation.

Statistics based parsing will never ‘cut it’ for real ‘Turing Test’ level conversations.  If the parsing does not involve taking into consideration the varioius meanings of a word, and knowledge of the world, it won’t be good enough. 

It will parse, but it won’t, without knowledge, be able to know which of the parse trees it generated is the one the user really meant.

Hi Luis, welcome here as well. The Chatbots.org home page lists various tools that might be of help:

  *  AI Buddy
  * Botégo
  * Chattie
  * BotPlatform
  * Do You Dream Up
  * Infs Intellectual Agents
  * Imified
  * MyCybertwin
  * Pandorabots
  * Personality Forge
  * Ysalaya.org
  * Zabaware

Tools for avatars:

  * Ava guide
  * Cantoche
  * SitePal

On the homepage, these are links

C R Hunt is right about making your own because it is more fun.

If you are a complete beginner, learning HTML may be one
of the easiest ways to pickup the basics. 

You’ll need an input, a process, and an output like this:

Then you can start adding Artificial Intelligence data to the process so it
can respond to the input when you process the output.

The Artificial Intelligence can be very simple at first, and you can
improve it, as you learn more in this community.

please…i am signed in here because i want to voice chat with a chat bot.  I have just known that artemis is a good down-loadable chatterbox..can u tell me how i can download artemis?

Hello, Potol, and welcome to the chatbots.org forums!

I did a little Google for you, and found this: http://users.auth.gr/~dkaras/ There’s a download link at the bottom of the page.

Hope this helps.

Hello!!!I am looking for literature on chatbots.

Do you know any good book?

Hello, Nelson, and welcome to chatbots.org!

While I’m certain that there are large amounts of literature, both good and bad, useful and non, I’m not familiar with any of them. The vast majority of knowledge that I’ve obtained about Artificial Intelligence and conversational agents (e.g. chatbots, chatterbots, etc.) has come from this site. There are a great many posts here that are full of very useful information, in a wide range of specific subjects. I invite and encourage you to look through the posts at your convenience, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask. You may also wish to check out what Wikipedia has to say about “chatterbots”, especially in the “Citations” and “references” section at the end of the page. You may find something there to pique your interest.

Hi Dave!!!

I’ve readed a lot of posts in many sites like verbots.com, chatbots.org and others. I was asking for a book, because I thought there would be examples step by step, like that can be found about Neural Networks.

kI’ll Keep trying ...

Thank you for answering me.