It is strange… I looked at everywhere and only one Chatterbot is built with
Verbot engine, it seems to be mine (Jeanneton in French)...
This engine is it so bad? I find it easy employs and powerful… No ?
Sylvain

You might find my designer interesting. It can work with characters designed for verbot.

Thanks Jan.
I just start to download your soft (basic) it seems great.

Question…
With verbot online we use this soft “Conversive’s Character Studio”
here
http://www.verbots.com/forums/dload.php?action=file&file_id=118
(it’s free)
But it works bad online (animation are bad coz cookies or else… I don’t
know why… In fact it seems nobody knows)
Are you saying that your soft works online with Verbot ? How is it possible ?

Sorry for my English.
Friendly.
Sylvain.

Well first trouble error message is
“Failled to load avaible voices”
Voices i have with Verbot work well…
Any idéa ?
Sylvain

You closed the program before actually loading a bot, most likely. I had the same issue once, though I had thought Jan had fixed that problem.

Dave Morton - Oct 30, 2011:

You closed the program before actually loading a bot, most likely. I had the same issue once, though I had thought Jan had fixed that problem.

Thanks.  I think perhaps something else might also be the case.

Sylvain, what windows version are you using? Is it 32 bit or 64 bit?
Could the message have been: ‘Failed to load voice: xxx, with message: yyyy’?
When you load a project that already has a voice specified (which could be the case with some of the demo’s), but the specific voice isn’t found, this error message is shown in the log-window. Normally, I always select the default microsoft voice available in vista and Win7, but it isn’t present in XP. This is no big problem, it’s just to let you know that voice is turned off, cause it couldn’t find the previous selection.
Could this be the situation? If so, to fix it: select a different voice and turn audio output back on.
If this is not the problem, could you perhaps give some more info? (like does it repeat, the os version,..)

About the Conversive’s Character Studio:
Characters designed with this application should also work with my app. If there are some hickups (could always be, cause it’s not the same code, I implemented it myself),  could you let me know?
There is a downside to using this app however: not all the features will be available. I’ve extended the file format a bit. Now, there are plans for building a similar app, but there is definitely not gonna be a release in the next 12 months.

Thanks to take to reply.
I use Win7 32 bits. Nada no voices, now Chatbot designer crash…
i’m not able to run it anymore… Maybe my machine… Maybe a problem
with McAfee Security Scan Plus….
(Sometimes i got this message. “Hab.Designer.exe stop to work”)
I searched solutions on internet nada again…
I user Anna microsoft voice (and others) who correctly works (i just
tested it) with “Text Speaker”, “Dspeech” etc… Strange…
/*
Eg: Double clik on your icon:—->
Failed to load the available voices with erro message: Le format de la chaîne d’entrés est incorrect.
(Two times)

After that soft is open. Ok —>
Open—> Name_age.dlp
nada… no chatbot in chatbot windows…
*/
Any hopes ?

Your .ccs avatars work well on Conversive’s Character Studio, but there is
several adaptations to do. Eg:
Conversive’s Character Studio always start an animation with what you
call Tara_base.
(if i say stupidities forget this.) In Conversive’s Character Studio there
is no “layer” for hairs. That means Tara_base must have her hairs…
If you want i can, for you, build Tara.ccs for Verbot i’ll send online…
If yes, send to me tara_base.png with hairrs. :0)
It’s a good avatar and i can add some animations if you want.
Etc..

Friendly
Sylvain.

Ok, here goes. The error message is indeed because of a voice name it can’t find. Maybe it has something to do with a different OS language. Anyway, you have a point about it being a nuisance. It should just select the first available voice if it can’t find the previously selected one. I’ll update that in the next version.

Next, about the ‘age_name’ demo: if the chatbot-view wasn’t open: go to view/chatbot/chatbot (if you have the basic version), view/communications channels/chatbot if you have the pro.
This will open up the page with the character and where you can select the voices. If there was no character visible, it’s because I didn’t make an initial selection for this project. Go to the last drop-down box in the chatbot-view and select the character that you want to see. Once you save the project with a character selected, it will open it again with the same character. (I’ll update that also in the next release so that the default template is set up with a character selected)
Note that the name-age demo is just that, a demo. It can only do a few simple things.

Finally: The Tara avatar is designed for my chatbot designer, which is where she will look much better than in verbot: hair and so on will be present.
For the animations: I’ll put up a topic file for both characters, so you can see the available animations.

Ok thanks :0)
Sylvain

@GCC: the error message that you got and the one Sylvain reported do appear to be the same as you initially said. Do you still get this error, or was it a 1 time thing?
I know where it’s happening, I just can’t figure out which string should be incorrectly formatted.

I only got it on the first run. Once I chose a voice for the bot, the error went away.

I’ve just recently upgraded my system to Windows 7 from XP, and I have to re-install literally every program I’ve got, so I’ll try it again, once I’ve installed the programs (both Basic and Pro), and let you know what I find out. It will be a few days though, since I have literally dozens (maybe even as many as 100+. I haven’t counted) of programs to install.

Dave Morton - Oct 31, 2011:

I only got it on the first run. Once I chose a voice for the bot, the error went away.

I’ve just recently upgraded my system to Windows 7 from XP, and I have to re-install literally every program I’ve got, so I’ll try it again, once I’ve installed the programs (both Basic and Pro), and let you know what I find out. It will be a few days though, since I have literally dozens (maybe even as many as 100+. I haven’t counted) of programs to install.

Wait, wait, hold on. Let me do a new build so that, in case it goes wrong again, there is a proper stracktrace so that I know the code location of the problem.

PS: I know what you mean. I try to delay a fresh instal as long as I can, just to save me the hassle.

Ok, I’ve made a new build. You can get it from my download page.

Thanks, Jan. I’ll give them a go.

[edit]
You may wish to consider (at some point) including version numbers in your app’s file name, just in case of incompatibility issues with some users. Just a thought.
[/edit]

Jan, a couple of questions regarding the file wordnet.zip that you have available for download:

On your downloads page, you state:

“This zip file (wordnet.zip) contains a database that can be copied into the application directory of the chatbot designer”

Do you mean that literally, or did you mean that we should unzip it’s contents to the correct directory?

Also, you mention:

“wordnet’s structure isn’t ideal for AI”

Can you outline for me a structure that would be more useful? I’m sure that, like Andrew is doing with Yago2, I can create a “translation” that you might find useful.

I’ve already created a very clean relational database implementation for WordNet that is available from my site at http://wixml.net/wordnet.html

There are also other implementations available that are referenced on the actual WordNet home page, though I don’t know if any of them were as thorough in decoding all the complicated associations between word senses and synsets as I was. There was a lot of stuff that wasn’t actually documented and which didn’t become clear without careful examination of the data.