I am trying to learn how to use Chatscript by creating a bot that can discuss movies with you.  I realize a good conversation involves a good balance between taking and relinquishing control but I am not sure how to implement this in a script.

My script works by reusing gambits with a nonsense pattern(so they dont get said by control) and then trying to catch user responses in rejoinders. I have a lot of reuses so that the conversation is led by the bot moving into a looping structure.

For example it starts with “what movies have you seen” and then moves to a movie specific topic based on input. Then switches to profit, plothole, actor or scene discussions based on input and tries to rejoinder input. if they all fail, it moves back to “what other movies have you seen”.

My biggest problems are knowing what to catch and say. I have yet to create a good topic for a single movie. I understand you have your wife to aid with the creative aspect but can you recommend any sources for example conversations? I thought IRC might be one but there are no public logs and also I wasnt able to find any active users in channels I went to—- only idlers.

Conversation protocol is a very interesting topic.  I’m working on a wrapper for chat bots as part of my research/work on chat bots in games that implements some very basic ideas, attempting to quantify a conversational personality like:

- how chatty a robot is ( taciturn -> talkative )
- how much silence they can tolerate before introducing a gambit ( passive -> impatient )
- how they handled ‘interuptions’ and other breaks from protocol ( polite -> rude )
- etc…

You can see this gets pretty complex quickly, especially if you are expecting there to be more than two people/bots/entities engaged in a conversation ( I am ).

On source of conversations on movies - have you tried looking at IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes?  You may be able to data mine those live for nuggets if you wanted to get super fancy.  I can imagine you could key on the data from a specific user of those sites to create the illusion of a bot with real set of opinions without having to write everything. 

I think both of those have APIs…. (http://developer.rottentomatoes.com)
( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1966503/does-imdb-provide-an-api)

I recall checking RT forums for a specific movie and only seeing “it was good/bad” threads not discussing specific aspects or scenes. But IMDB seems to have more data to mine so thanks.
I am nowhere near ready for external communications with my bots though so those APIs will have to wait.

I’m afraid we dont have good sources for conversations. We generate it ourselves

Hah! Not if you’re an introvert…..