> http://www.askmoni.com/

@askMoniCom: “askMoni is a new approach to human/machine interaction. Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Open Platform”

“askMoni provides a restful api interface allowing you as a software developer to connect to askMoni, define speech patterns and trigger custom events.”

=> http://www.askmoni.com/pdf/askMoni_speech_platform_api.pdf

Seems a little random for my tastes

anonymous: what colour is the red sea
Moni: Yellow. 
anonymous: are you female
Moni: I’d like to receive for cheese
anonymous: how high is Mount Everest
Moni: Great question. I would also like to know how much higher other mountain ranges are expected to grow. 
anonymous: how many people live in the UK
Moni: 800000
(Steve’s note: The population of the UK is in fact over 60 million)

Same experience here, very hit and miss.

Not what I expected from the terms “NLP” and “AI”. When I asked what a cat does it explained how to apply shampoo. When I asked what a dog was it said something or other that had the word dog in it but answered to something I hadn’t asked. I checked out the “brain” part, which suggests that it contains question-answer pairs on all sorts of trivial topics. Instead of matching “What does a cat do?” with questions containing the obvious noun “cat”, it matches lots of questions containing “..., what do I do?”. Neural net, equal weight keyword matching, community-submitted content… That makes it about as reliable as Cleverbot.

Moni is still learning. So please forgive her in case she doesn’t give you an appropriate answer to your question. However you can help her learning by answering open questions in the Questions section

Well, it seems the Chatbots.org Turing test results are in.  Thanks to the expert judges for posting their keen insights, which I find most helpful.  (I’m just glad it’s not my bot this time around.)

lol @Marcus. We do seem to be a pretty jaded and demanding bunch, don’t we?

I must admit that I was also hard on Moni. However, I thought “her” response to one of the questions I posed was actually rather good:

anonymous: what is the taxonomy of a mudskipper?

Moni: Sorry I wasn’t able to answer your question, I’ll ask an expert and if you don’t mind asking me again tomorrow, I promise to have a much better answer for you. In the meanwhile I have a counterquestion for you: what is taxonomy?

I plan on returning tomorrow to get her updated answer. Then I’ll report back.

If it had been your bot I would have added constructive advice. As it is I’ve seen far too many commercial chatbots advertising themselves with overstatements. Technically it may be an interesting compilation of services and communities, but the search algorithm really needs improvement before I could even consider the optional extras. What also weighed in was the odd grammar in many questions that it has on file, which doesn’t look like it’s helping things much.

AS promised, I asked the question again, and here is a more detailed excerpt from the conversation:

anonymous: what is the taxonomy of a mudskipper?

Moni: It is that the same as a Gobie. 

anonymous: it’s not the same. A gobie is distantly related, but not amphibious, while a mudskipper is an amphibious fish.

Moni: An amphibious assault ship is a type of amphibious warfare ship employed to land and support ground forces on enemy territory by an amphibious assault. 

anonymous: Yes, that may be true, but it’s not even closely related to mudskippers.

Moni: Would you want to swap anything for any of your ecotools eyeshadow brushes or NYX milk? My list - http://www.reddit.com/r/makeupexchange/comments/1avvzl/offer_ud_247_cargo_lancome_train_case_pixi_opi/

As you can see, it showed some promise, at first, but then went completely off topic when it focused on the wrong keyword. Shame really. Perhaps in time we’ll see some improvement? One can only hope.

Initially, I had asked if she played a musical instrument whereby she indicated several; piano, cello, violin, viola but her Accordion trumps them all! The conversation continues below:

anonymous: That’s wonderful. What’s your favorite song to play?
Moni: Michael Winslow (I selected that it was a bad answer and for her to try again)
anonymous: That’s wonderful. What’s your favorite song to play?
Moni: Sorry I wasn’t able to answer your question, I’ll ask an expert and if you don’t mind asking me again tomorrow, I promise to have a much better answer for you. In the meanwhile I have a counterquestion for you: What’s your favorite “WTF did I just read?”

That surprized me!

One has to wonder if her programming will adjust or whether she (her mind) will get better with time. Nice find, Marcus. There are many times that I simply love to root for the underdog.

Lol @ the counterquestion XD