If you use or have ever used AIML, please take the following survey:
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/496274/AIML-Survey

I’m collecting some info that will be used in a presentation I’ll be giving at
the Chatbots 3.1 conference at the end of April.

Thanks in advance!

-Adeena
riotsw.com

Hello, Adeena Mignogna, and welcome to the forums.

I completed your survey for you. Judging from it’s content, am I to take it that you may have an alternative to the currently available AIML editors, or that you’re possibly researching the creation of such an alternative solution?

Took the survey. Success with your presentation.

Survey taken. Good luck with it all.

Adeena,

Your presentation, last year, at the the Chatbots 3.0 conference, was really great!

Thanks to all who’ve taken it so far!

And Dave - actually, I’ve had an editor out in the ether for a while.  It’s the SAE (Simple AIML Editor), it’s completely free, and one can find it on my website riotsw.com.  While at the moment, my primary focus is on the presentation, yes, I’ll probably use the info I collect to decide what features to add next to SAE. 

Big departure from my presentation last year (on small business)... hopefully I can make AIML content management a riveting topic!  :D

-Adeena
riotsw.com

AHA!!! I have the SAE, and have used it. Given the nature of my chatbot, I find it much easier to directly alter the database using PHPMyAdmin, but when I’ve had to extract the DB into discreet AIML files, it’s proven useful for “tidying up” the categories, and re-formatting the tags (everything in the DB is “inline”, and I prefer the tags to be nested, in the actual files). I’ve also taken a “stroll” through your website. VERY colorful, and fun to visit. By comparison, mine is rather drab. I’ll have to fix that, some day.

Now that I know “who you are”, I’ve got to say that I’m a fan of your work (no, folks, I’m NOT sucking up!), and if there’s anything I can do to be of assistance, just yell.

Lol!  So yep, for a little while, I’ve really been a lurker.  I’ve had some other personal, non-AI projects happening at home, so I haven’t been able to do much but lurk for a little while.    I tend to venture out this time of year with the Loebner contest right around the corner…

I understand the desire to edit the database directly.  I use Program E and Pandorabots - neither which are conducive to that kind of editing.  Honestly, in some ways I prefer editing text files directly, but when I want to look for something, or see what I have, I like the spreadsheet model.  But at the moment, SAE isn’t super conducive to working in the template part of the category and sometimes the way I work is that I have all my AIML loaded into SAE, use SAE to find what I have and don’t have, and then go to the text file, create the new categories and then re-load it into SAE.  Still not the most efficient way of working. 

My idea for SACE (Simple AIML Chat Engine - which is still incomplete) is that it’s a standalone program that is both the chat engine, and allows for direct editing of the “bot’s brain.”  We’ll see.  I’m using a database model similar to Program E, and it’s not working out too well. 

Will you be at the Chatbots conference this year?

-Adeena
riotsw.com

When I first created Morti, I was using Program E, but I could never get past the “echo bug”. I asked the original creator of Program E for permission to take over the code, and make the needed improvements, but by the time I got that permission, I had found Program O, and had fallen in love. I still plan on improving Program E, but just haven’t had the time to do so yet.

No disrespect intended here, but it seems to me that using one program to locate a needed category, and another to edit it, or to add a new one, sounds a bit clunky. Just out of curiosity, what language is SAE coded in? I’m passingly familiar with VB.NET, and have VS2010 for the programs that I write (I’m not an expert, by ANY stretch of the imagination, though), and I’ve written a couple of simple text editors myself. It shouldn’t be all that difficult to “add in” an Excel spreadsheet panel into an MDI application, though the functions to translate from XML data to a spreadsheet may prove a trifle daunting. I don’t know, since I’ve never tried.

While I would dearly love to attend the conference, my means for doing so are severely limited. Unfortunately, I live on the other side of the continent, and a trip of that scope is beyond my financial and scheduling limitations. I’ve thought about asking Dr. Wallace and a few other people about the possibility of a similar conference being held on the West Coast, but haven’t gotten around to it.

Yes, I had a similar experience where I wanted to help improve Program E, got permission to do so, and then haven’t touched it since.  I’ve met several converts to Program O, but also haven’t had time to look at it. 

I agree that if I’m not fully using my own program, there’s something wrong.  I’m using VS C# (previously 2008, but I just got a new computer and now I’m using 2010), but that’s not my issue - it’s one of simple design.  I need to put some more thought into how the SAE interface should be designed such that I want to spend my time in there, not in text files.  The idea is that it would have the look/feel of a spreadsheet, but the problem is when I go to work in the template.  My templates are LONG and involve LOTS of tags.  Before I wrote SAE I was managing them in an Excel spreadsheet, but there were limitations, even with the macros I wrote to help deal with working with the XML data. 

But I think I’ve got a few things rattling around in my brain right now… which I’ll hopefully translate into an SAE update in the near future.

Sorry you won’t be at the conference.  I understand those kinds of limitations… Philly is drivable for me, which makes it attend-able for me.    But the nice thing is that last year, all the presentations were video taped and posted to the web.  I imagine they’ll do the same thing again this year.  And yep - I will be sharing the results of my little survey at the conference and afterwards.

Of course, if you wanted to swing by and pick me up while driving to Philly, I’d help with the gas.

Before you look into Program O (if you ever get the time to do so), you should know that Liz Perreau, Program O’s creator, is near to publishing a new version (2.0), which is supposed to have a lot of improvements over the current version (1.5~something). I’ve had a few email chats with her, and I’m really looking forward to checking it out. Morti’s script uses a VASTLY modified version of Program O, and I’ve published some of the improvements and modifications that I’ve made in the Program O forums, so possibly version 2 will have some of the changes I’ve applied to Morti.

I also have VS 2010, but I program mainly in VB.NET (I think I’ve mentioned that before. ). I know about as much about C as the average American knows about Swahili, I’m afraid. I’ve always wanted to learn, even back in the early 80’s, but I never took the time to do so. I’ve been writing small, simple apps, in various languages, since I had a Radio Shack CoCo, back in 1979. If I had taken the time back then to take some serious courses, and push my hobby somewhere beyond just a few hours per weekend, I might have… Ah, but that’s all in the past, isn’t it?

Sorry I didn’t mean to drop this thread.  It’s been a crazy week and both me and my little one have been under the weather….

I did just have a little chat with Morti.  Just out of curiosity… how many AIML categories does he have?  While not all of the responses were great, which is typical of most AIML bots, technically, it worked just fine.  I will check into Program O more when I have a chance.  I have too many other things to do first like prepare for this chatbots conference. 

Does program O allow for custom AIML tags?  That’s important to my bot, Lucy.  I do a lot with custom tags in Program E.  A couple things in Lucy stopped working randomly… and I’m not sure if it’s related to the fact that my web hosting peeps upgraded PHP to the latest version on me.  I also just added a link to Khloe, an AIML only bot that’s hosted at Pandorabots, to my website (riotsw.com).  She was my entry into last year’s Loebner contest and if I’m able to enter again this year, my new bot will be based on her.  For some reason, every year I keep missing the chatterbot challenge deadline… March always seems to be a crazy month for me and I miss it!

If you’re still interested in learning some C, I don’t think it’s terribly difficult if you start in an environment like MS Visual Studio (which is free).  Like everything, right now it’s just time!  Myself, I’ve been programming since the early/mid 80s and even did it a while professionally. 

Like you, Adeena, I’ve unintentionally neglected this thread. I’ve been on a family related trip (NOT a vacation, mind you) from my home here in Nevada, to Nashville, TN and only just got back this morning (at 4:30AM!). I hope that both you and the young one are feeling better.

Morti currently has 46,000+ categories, though a great number of them (too many for my tastes, TBH, but I’m working on that) are shared with ALICE. As I comb through his categories, I pick out the ones that are in greatest need of editing, and make the requisite changes. It’s a bit tedious, especially when I lose my place and have to find it again, but that’s life, isn’t it?

Program O does, indeed, handle custom tags. All that is required is to create a function named ct_[tag] where [tag] is the tag you wish to use. Program O automatically looks to see if the function exists, and calls it as needed. It’s pretty cool, that way.

I’ll have to check out Khloe at some point, this morning. I’ve visited your site on numerous occasions, and have enjoyed some of your stories and such, so I look forward to interacting with your chatbot. Given Morti’s performance in this year’s CBC, I’ve decided to put off his entry into the Loebner Competition for another year, since he’s obviously not ready for it. It’s nice that he placed in the top 50% of the entrants, but I was hoping that he would do better than what he did.

I already have VS 2008 (not 2010, as I had previously stated), but like you said, time is a major factor, and is becoming continuously more rare, for me. I started out my “programming” hobby on a Radio Shack Color Computer, back in 1979, and quickly advanced to 8080/Z80 Assembly Language, then 6502 Assembly, and I even tried to learn 286/386 Machine Code, but felt that I was beginning to reach the end of my interest level in low level languages, which are very powerful, but also EXTREMELY unforgiving of typos and other errors, so I got away from programming for a while, until I took up Visual Basic 6, a few years ago. One of these days, I’ll “crack open” C, and have a look. I’ll just have to more or less force myself to put away my other projects for a while to do it.