Thanks CR,
Skynet-AI is considered fair use. The makers of the movie have never tried to uphold any trademarks/copyrights to the names of items in the movies (with the exception of “Terminator”) and it would be difficult for them to do it now.
There are many commercial examples including:
Skynet (satellite), a UK military communications system.
Belgacom Skynet, a Belgian interactive digital media company
Loral Skynet or Telesat, a Canadian communications satellite operator
Skynet Asia Airways, a low-cost Japanese airline
Skynet Airlines, a defunct Irish airline
Sky Network Television
Also a new robotics company Cyberdyne, has registered their name as a trademark.
http://www.cyberdyne.jp/english/
CR-“Still, it seems like a bad idea to market your “product” with a name that references so many other things.”
You are right. But Skynet-AI is more of a test bed and a way to promote the technology. As “Alice” is to AIML, Skynet-AI is to JAIL(TM). JAIL is really the product (although the “brain” of Skynet-AI could also be).
CR-“How much time would this take to alter all references to ‘Skynet’.”
I could do it in a few minutes. The BOT name is stored as a variable. Of course the personality is more tied to the movie franchise character (although as time has gone on this is less so, I have made Skynet-AI a “friendly AI” because of the amount of young kids I get talking to it). If I really had to I could “re-purpose” the character in a matter of days (versus weeks or months).
CR-“I know you’ve said in the past that you’ve built other bots, but it seems like Skynet is your most advanced creation.”
Skynet-AI is my most advanced bot. I have been putting the advances I have been working on back into it.
As version .004 of Skynet-AI stabilizes I have been thinking about what to do next. I’ll be working on the math and memory modules on an on-going basis, but it may be time again see how fast I can build a new character or update one or my old bots.
Some of my choices under consideration:
Platform based:
Windows/IE - Merlin (one of my earlier bots) has good animation and speech output, but it is based on MS discontinued agent technology
Android/Chrome - I added speech input in chrome and I have a avatar built for the platform. But need to find a TTS out solution. I would focus this on using just Google tech and heavy integration with Google Docs.
Character based:
“Computer” - from the StarTrek series (focused on database retrieval)
“Colossus” - from the Forbin project (a darker computer destined to dominate the world)
Independent:
Striker - (one of my earliest bots) focused on Soccer (football - for those international visitors)
New Human - Built from scratch to act like a person. Possibly targeted at the Loebner competition next year.
Other Projects:
HTML5 database extensions - allowing a user to train and save the bot AI via standard web methods on the client side.
IPod/Ipad/Iphone App - It currently works on all these platforms but could have extra features as a native app. (As a side note, I think I could port any AIML bot over to JAIL and then run it on an Iphone. If Steve hadn’t gotten interest from another source, I would have suggested if for Mitsuku).
Facebook App / Google+ App - I might test how tightly I can mesh with social media platforms.
Natural Language Understanding - Working on the word math problems gave me some ideas/insight into adding deep understanding into an AI.
Some of these things will end up in the next version of Skynet-AI. Additionally, I believe JAIL is now robust enough that I could undertake commercial projects with the platform.
If you have opinions on what you think I should do next with JAIL or Skynet-AI, let me know.
PS: One of the new hidden functions in Skynet-AI is the ability to show word frequency. If you have a conversation with him and then enter:
word count
he will then show the list of all words and their frequency that you entered so far.