Hello, I’m new to chatbots.org. I’ve read Dave Morton’s beginner guide(https://www.chatbots.org/ai_zone/viewthread/492/) and I chose to make a chatbot with CS. And I have a few questions..

Dave Morton said..

Program your bot to make use of certain system commands to act like the other stand-alone apps, in that you can have it play media files, open documents, including web pages, open or close other programs, or any number of other tasks. In short, you can use ChatScript to create a “Personal Computer Assistant”

So I had a question… And I’m really embarassed for asking it.. But..

How do you make the bot play media files, open documents, open and close other programs?...

And how do you give CS a better chat interface, y’know make look cooler and stuff? A MS-DOS prompt looks really old and boring, y’know.

So anyways… That’s all the questions I had..

Thanks in advance.

- Kodz

You can use the functions popen() or system() to open external files or programs with the file/program’s filename as the function’s argument.
See the documentation on “Chatscript External Communications” at http://chatscript.sourceforge.net/Documentation

Don Patrick - Apr 4, 2015:

You can use the functions popen() or system() to open external files or programs with the file/program’s filename as the function’s argument.
See the documentation on “Chatscript External Communications” at http://chatscript.sourceforge.net/Documentation

Thanks a lot. Btw, how can I change the user interface?

Hi and welcome, Kodz.

A while back, I modified a PHP-driven web interface for ChatScript and posted it here in the forums (somewhere). I also wrote a “talking” GUI fir ChatScript in Visual Basic that used native Windows SAPI functions to allow both TTS and speech recognition in the interface. That should also be posted somewhere in the forums here. I’ll provide the links to the files in this thread, but I strongly urge you to search for the relevant threads as well, because you might find the discussions about the files to be useful. Till then, here are the links:

Talking GUI Setup
ChatScript Web Client

[edit]
While getting the links to these files, I found that the old links are somehow broken. I’ll have to look into that. I’ve tested these links, however, so you won’t have any trouble with them.
[/edit]

Don Patrick - Apr 4, 2015:

You can use the functions popen() or system() to open external files or programs with the file/program’s filename as the function’s argument.
See the documentation on “Chatscript External Communications” at http://chatscript.sourceforge.net/Documentation

I’m having a similar issue and I can’t seem to figure out the proper syntax for using these functions. Do they go in the .top files?

Harry’s control script uses popen to voice output what he says:
  $$tmp = ^“talk \”$$tmp\” “
  popen($$tmp null)
The second argument is null because there is no output coming back that needs analysis