While taking a break from working on my parsing software just now, I found a recent video on youtube which I think qualifies as “state of the art” chatbot technology. The video was of a live demonstration of an upcoming internet based game called Bot Colony. The game is played by talking to the characters in the game via a microphone, in plain English, and there do not seem to be any limits on the scope of the conversations that the player can have with the non-player characters. Take a look at the E3 demo video on http://www.botcolony.com and see what you think of it.

Andrew Smith - Oct 9, 2010:

While taking a break from working on my parsing software just now, I found a recent video on youtube which I think qualifies as “state of the art” chatbot technology. The video was of a live demonstration of an upcoming internet based game called Bot Colony. The game is played by talking to the characters in the game via a microphone, in plain English, and there do not seem to be any limits on the scope of the conversations that the player can have with the non-player characters. Take a look at the E3 demo video on http://www.botcolony.com and see what you think of it.

Interesting. It’s the beginning. The new age is coming.

I signed up for the beta testing program, but have yet to hear back from them. I’ll keep everyone posted on whether or not I’m accepted, and also post my impressions and thoughts (if allowed to) if I am.

Nice demo Andrew. Some quick thoughts from the demo:

1. it seems that half of the dialogues in the demo are in simple question-answer mode. I don’t know if the answers are canned or have some options, but the questions are simple “5W” ones without comma/conjunction/sub-sentences. Given the current situation of chatbot development, I think the simple 5W Q&A is the easiest part (though “how” and “why” is a little bit tougher). 

2. the other half of the dialogues are instructions to the bot to locate player’s luggage. From my experiences, the simple imperative sentences (again, without comma/conjunction/sub-sentence) are the second easiest part of bot development, esp. when being used for controlling a robot/machine.

So,  before seeing any dialogues with complex declaratives or interrogatives,  I shall say I see no “state of the art” in the bot itself. But the demo does show the grand potentials of the bot. What I like most is the design of the game, which is based on natural language scripts so player can change the plot. The art design is also great. But, if the bot can only do what I see in the demo, I really doubt about the experience it will bring to the player. I’ll feel bored soon if I have to give out instructions with details like “raise your right hand” or “drop it”.

The most important issue is communication. A 7 years old boy may only use simple sentences, but he has true intelligence and can communicate with visitors.

Actually, more complex sentences are based on more knowledge. Any true AI bot may start from simple sentences.

John Li - Oct 10, 2010:

Nice demo Andrew. Some quick thoughts from the demo:

1. it seems that half of the dialogues in the demo are in simple question-answer mode. I don’t know if the answers are canned or have some options, but the questions are simple “5W” ones without comma/conjunction/sub-sentences. Given the current situation of chatbot development, I think the simple 5W Q&A is the easiest part (though “how” and “why” is a little bit tougher). 

2. the other half of the dialogues are instructions to the bot to locate player’s luggage. From my experiences, the simple imperative sentences (again, without comma/conjunction/sub-sentence) are the second easiest part of bot development, esp. when being used for controlling a robot/machine.

So,  before seeing any dialogues with complex declaratives or interrogatives,  I shall say I see no “state of the art” in the bot itself. But the demo does show the grand potentials of the bot. What I like most is the design of the game, which is based on natural language scripts so player can change the plot. The art design is also great. But, if the bot can only do what I see in the demo, I really doubt about the experience it will bring to the player. I’ll feel bored soon if I have to give out instructions with details like “raise your right hand” or “drop it”.

Nathan Hu - Oct 10, 2010:

The most important issue is communication. A 7 years old boy may only use simple sentences, but he has true intelligence and can communicate with visitors.

Actually, more complex sentences are based on more knowledge. Any true AI bot may start from simple sentences.

Dealing with simple 5W questions within a limited/fixed domain, as what I see in the demo, is a feature you can easily find in many bots today. For example, an Alice/AIML bot may do the same in less a day if you set it up correctly. Yes true AI can express itself though mere simple sentences, or many other ways, but I don’t see any true AI from the demo; it’s just a familiar behavior found in many other bots.

Dealing with complex/compound sentences doesn’t means true AI, of course, but given the general situation of current AI development, if a bot can do that, I shall totally agree that it’s “state of the art”.

More about Bot Colony, a conversational video game, where it’s all about interaction with English speaking chatbots.

This natural interaction in English is novel, entertaining, and uniquely immersive, as our characters possess human-like conversation abilities.

Before you start reading, you might want to have a look a the video below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8JD-fN4gT8&feature=player_embedded

Here’s what I found on their website:
Comparison with previous games:
Until Bot Colony, dialogue in videogames took the form of dialogue trees, essentially canned choices from a list (for example, Mass Effect, Hotel Dusk, The Last Express and older text adventure games), voice commands (EndWar, Sega Seaman), or an attempt to key on a word or extract a sentiment from the input (Façade, Starship Titanic). In Bot Colony, the player speaks freely, asking questions, seeking clarification, or requesting the characters to carry out actions, and the game attempts to respond intelligently. In this respect, the North Side language understanding technology is superior to chatbots, which are limited to serving ready-made answers incorporating words or clauses previously uttered (or typed) by the user/previous users; this makes a chatbot seem responsive for a small number of dialog steps (Jabberwacky, Allen, Alice). Façade relies on word polarity and a shallow processing of language, rather than deep semantic processing as in Bot Colony.

English as a scripting language
The dialogue pipeline running on a server-farm is the key technological innovation in the game. While North Side is not claiming to have passed the Turing test. That would mean that if a person saw only the transcript of a dialog between the player and a game character, he would not be able to tell if the dialog was between two humans, or a human and a computer. North Side does not claim that its software performs perfectly. Natural language understanding is a very hard problem, and the company’s objective is to understand language well enough in order to complete the levels of the game, or to help people improve their English. In many cases, the software may not understand the player and will ask for clarification. This is part and parcel of the Bot Colony gameplay. It is not difficult to say something that a character will not understand – the real challenge is to get through to characters, and advance in the game. The language software is general purpose, and not tied to the Bot Colony game in particular. In general, the hardest problems in understanding language are tied to the lack of sufficient world knowledge: things that are obvious to a person are not known to a computer – but they are needed to understand what someone said.

In Bot Colony, game objects behave and interact like objects in the real-world, further enhancing this feeling of immersion. The Bot Colony game engine, Anitron, is data-driven, so all scenes are actually real-time simulations. There’s no need to use cut scenes.

Bot Colony is not programmed in a traditional way. All game logic, animations and interactions are entirely scripted in English. English-based scripting will enable players to extend the game world with their own content. A script describes in simple English how a game entity should react, when its context and probable goals are taken into account.

The language software attempts to extract the correct meaning from a player’s utterance, irrespective of the particular words or the syntax used, and attempts to it to a familiar context. This means that a player may formulate the same message in many different ways and the game will extract the same semantics in all cases.

North Side believes that its innovative use of English as a scripting language will enable players to extend the world by adding their own content. This English-based scripting technology has additional applications, for example to rapid visualization of movie scripts, workflow visualization, debrief, and exploring alternative courses of action.

ESL: English as a Second Language
There is a special beta program for non-native English speakers. But there are more beta testers. http://www.botcolony.com/beta.html

Chatbots.org involvement?
We’d like to be partner of Bot Colony. What could we bring to the table?

-bring advanced testers to their beta program (for example, senior members who have written more than 50 postins in AI Zone).
-help them find talented people (they have job openings)
-publish news about Bot Colony on a regular basis
-sell the game once it’s live

In return, I’d like to have:
-those characters on Chatbots.org
-a position within the game about Chatbots.org
-a link on their partner page
-help with setting up our animation forum

Do you have additional ideas how Bot Colony and Chatbots.org could help each other?

Nice, I can’t wait to be a player. They are doing what I want to do.

If you read their description, you will know that their chatting is based on semantic nderstanding. It’s not a simple search and answer system like Alice/AMIL.

I don’t know if their system is the “state of the art”, but It is obviously advanced than AIML based system.

John Li - Oct 11, 2010:

Dealing with simple 5W questions within a limited/fixed domain, as what I see in the demo, is a feature you can easily find in many bots today. For example, an Alice/AIML bot may do the same in less a day if you set it up correctly. Yes true AI can express itself though mere simple sentences, or many other ways, but I don’t see any true AI from the demo; it’s just a familiar behavior found in many other bots.

Dealing with complex/compound sentences doesn’t means true AI, of course, but given the general situation of current AI development, if a bot can do that, I shall totally agree that it’s “state of the art”.

Nathan Hu - Oct 11, 2010:

If you read their description, you will know that their chatting is based on semantic nderstanding. It’s not a simple search and answer system like Alice/AMIL.

I don’t know if their system is the “state of the art”, but It is obviously advanced than AIML based system.

If the outcome is nothing more than fixed answers to simple 5w questions, I’d rather use AIML since it’s more efficient for the task. With the deluxe features like semantic understanding, I’d like to see more than what I see in the demo.

And one of the problem of AI is exaggeration. Once the users are told that the game can communicate with players in plain English, don’t expect them to have any tolerance on simple sentences. As player experience is one of the most critical issue in any game, I see the bot as a double-sided sword because it can attract players easily and disappoint them even more easily.

I don’t see any exaggeration on the Bot Colony website. In fact the developers are at pains to point out the limitations of their technology and how they have incorporated it into the game.

http://www.botcolony.com/info.html

“In many cases, the software may not understand the player and will ask for clarification. This is part and parcel of the Bot Colony gameplay. It is not difficult to say something that a character will not understand – the real challenge is to get through to characters, and advance in the game.”

However I do agree with John that so far we haven’t seen an adequate demonstration of their technology being stressed by a naive user. Developers are notorious for being able to avoid their own bugs during demonstrations and testing, whether deliberately or subconsciously. Hopefully the beta testing program will be able to provide us with that information.

Andrew Smith - Oct 11, 2010:

I don’t see any exaggeration on the Bot Colony website. In fact the developers are at pains to point out the limitations of their technology and how they have incorporated it into the game.
http://www.botcolony.com/info.html

“In many cases, the software may not understand the player and will ask for clarification. This is part and parcel of the Bot Colony gameplay. It is not difficult to say something that a character will not understand – the real challenge is to get through to characters, and advance in the game.”

However I do agree with John that so far we haven’t seen an adequate demonstration of their technology being stressed by a naive user. Developers are notorious for being able to avoid their own bugs during demonstrations and testing, whether deliberately or subconsciously. Hopefully the beta testing program will be able to provide us with that information.

You’re right Andrew, Bot Colony developers are actually very honest in the limitations. I’ve quickly read the page and feel very interested in the English-based scripting design. If the game engine is data-driven and all scenes are real-time simulations, as described in the same page, I shall comfortably say this game is “state of the art”.

Erwin Van Lun - Oct 11, 2010:

More about Bot Colony, a conversational video game, where it’s all about interaction with English speaking chatbots.

This natural interaction in English is novel, entertaining, and uniquely immersive, as our characters possess human-like conversation abilities.

Before you start reading, you might want to have a look a the video below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8JD-fN4gT8&feature=player_embedded

Here’s what I found on their website:
Comparison with previous games:
Until Bot Colony, dialogue in videogames took the form of dialogue trees, essentially canned choices from a list (for example, Mass Effect, Hotel Dusk, The Last Express and older text adventure games), voice commands (EndWar, Sega Seaman), or an attempt to key on a word or extract a sentiment from the input (Façade, Starship Titanic). In Bot Colony, the player speaks freely, asking questions, seeking clarification, or requesting the characters to carry out actions, and the game attempts to respond intelligently. In this respect, the North Side language understanding technology is superior to chatbots, which are limited to serving ready-made answers incorporating words or clauses previously uttered (or typed) by the user/previous users; this makes a chatbot seem responsive for a small number of dialog steps (Jabberwacky, Allen, Alice). Façade relies on word polarity and a shallow processing of language, rather than deep semantic processing as in Bot Colony.

English as a scripting language
The dialogue pipeline running on a server-farm is the key technological innovation in the game. While North Side is not claiming to have passed the Turing test. That would mean that if a person saw only the transcript of a dialog between the player and a game character, he would not be able to tell if the dialog was between two humans, or a human and a computer. North Side does not claim that its software performs perfectly. Natural language understanding is a very hard problem, and the company’s objective is to understand language well enough in order to complete the levels of the game, or to help people improve their English. In many cases, the software may not understand the player and will ask for clarification. This is part and parcel of the Bot Colony gameplay. It is not difficult to say something that a character will not understand – the real challenge is to get through to characters, and advance in the game. The language software is general purpose, and not tied to the Bot Colony game in particular. In general, the hardest problems in understanding language are tied to the lack of sufficient world knowledge: things that are obvious to a person are not known to a computer – but they are needed to understand what someone said.

In Bot Colony, game objects behave and interact like objects in the real-world, further enhancing this feeling of immersion. The Bot Colony game engine, Anitron, is data-driven, so all scenes are actually real-time simulations. There’s no need to use cut scenes.

Bot Colony is not programmed in a traditional way. All game logic, animations and interactions are entirely scripted in English. English-based scripting will enable players to extend the game world with their own content. A script describes in simple English how a game entity should react, when its context and probable goals are taken into account.

The language software attempts to extract the correct meaning from a player’s utterance, irrespective of the particular words or the syntax used, and attempts to it to a familiar context. This means that a player may formulate the same message in many different ways and the game will extract the same semantics in all cases.

North Side believes that its innovative use of English as a scripting language will enable players to extend the world by adding their own content. This English-based scripting technology has additional applications, for example to rapid visualization of movie scripts, workflow visualization, debrief, and exploring alternative courses of action.

ESL: English as a Second Language
There is a special beta program for non-native English speakers. But there are more beta testers. http://www.botcolony.com/beta.html

Chatbots.org involvement?
We’d like to be partner of Bot Colony. What could we bring to the table?

-bring advanced testers to their beta program (for example, senior members who have written more than 50 postins in AI Zone).
-help them find talented people (they have job openings)
-publish news about Bot Colony on a regular basis
-sell the game once it’s live

In return, I’d like to have:
-those characters on Chatbots.org
-a position within the game about Chatbots.org
-a link on their partner page
-help with setting up our animation forum

Do you have additional ideas how Bot Colony and Chatbots.org could help each other?

I’m looking forward to cooperate with Chatbots.org members who have shared interests. Re: the Bot Colony Beta, it will unfortunately slide again (February ?).  The software is extremely complex, and natural language R&D is fraught with uncertainty, as I’m sure many of you know.
The software does go beyond question answering - it would not be an exciting videogame if that’s all our Intelligent Agents did. Our characters are not limited to being Chatbots - they are environment aware (3D) , aware of the interlocator’s goals, and they can do things (like prepare sushi, or bring you a drink). The quality of the conversation is different when a IA ‘understands’ the conversation context, the environment and his interlocutor’s intention.
I’ll make sure that members interested to contribute are accepted to the Beta. I’ll need to understand better what exactly Erwin asked for - as far as a link to Chatbots goes, that can be easily arranged.

Hello, Eugene, and welcome to chatbots.org forums!

I applied for the beta a while back, and was beginning to wonder if there might have been problems, since I hadn’t heard back yet. Of course, I’ve also had to change my email address in he interim, so had thought that might have contributed, as well. Anyway, I’m sorry to hear about the delay of the beta launch. I hope that everything from here on goes more smoothly for you and your team. I’m looking forward to learning more about this intriguing concept, and hope that I can provide some valuable contributions to it in the future.