Steve Worswick - Oct 17, 2013:

I just tried it. Can you reply to the email it sends to continue the conversation?

8man, I’m with Steve, functionality is more important than appearance.

If one could assign an email for their own chatbot (like open an account) and plug their own chatbot API into the backend (such as Pandorabots API, etc), then you would have a potentially ‘valuable’ email interface for chatbots….

I think micropayments, like $1 via PayPal, for annual registration is an adequate initial barrier to most egregious abuse; and, if it gets really popular, like after the first year, raise registration to $10 per year.  Or, if you wanted to get fancy, you could have traffic based billing, like .01 cent per message.

And some other cool features come to mind:

A botmaster could login to their account and see chat transcripts based on the remote user’s email address.

Also, a logged-in botmaster could reply manually from a web form, as if they were the chatbot, for fine-tuning clarifications, etc.

Marcus Endicott - Oct 17, 2013:

Steve Worswick - Oct 17, 2013:

I just tried it. Can you reply to the email it sends to continue the conversation?

8man, I’m with Steve, functionality is more important than appearance.

If one could assign an email for their own chatbot (like open an account) and plug their own chatbot API into the backend (such as Pandorabots API, etc), then you would have a potentially ‘valuable’ email interface for chatbots….

Oooh… So good to hear my nickname again, 8man or 8pla here on chatbots.org!

Some of this seems possible. First off, a gmail account for Elizabotmail is now setup. though not connected to any chatbot yet, so no need to email yet.  Next on the list… Setup an AIML chatbot. Pandorabots is an excellent option, and maybe later we may ask permission if tests are successful…. But since this an early email experiment, let’s go with Program O on a webserver of its own, and see how that works out first. Next the tricky part: Train the chatbot to read and send email based on emails it read.  He, he… Hee!  Sounds like fun!

∞Pla•Net - Oct 17, 2013:

Next the tricky part: Train the chatbot to read and send email based on emails it read.  He, he… Hee!  Sounds like fun!

8man, I reckon initially try to parse out the first full sentence.  You could even try parsing out all the full sentences, and sending *each* one into the *API* separately, then perhaps try combining the replies back together…?

I did something like this with my Twitter bots; and, I really wanted a spell checking API that would simply return thumbs down or thumbs up (red light/green light) on grammatically correct sentences.  So, I could eliminate most of the dross, and only send correct sentences into the dialog system API, just to make my life easier….  ;^)

8pla made a clever circumvention of the email system there . Sending emails is easy enough if the bot can activate a php page, but receiving is a tough one. If only a user could send emails from their mailbox to a php page, or if e.g. hotmail could auto-forward messages to one, then you’d have a working email loop.

I have doubts about the future of chatbot-email. The reason one uses email is that people have busy lives and aren’t always available for comment, but you always hope for a quick reply. Chatbots are online 24/7, so if I had a technical question about a product, wouldn’t it always be preferable to visit the chatbot online and get instantaneous answers?
Where I could imagine chatbot email interfaces to be of use are things like Iron Man’s Jarvis, a program that can read your email contents and tell you if there’s anything urgent or interesting to reply to. I wish I knew where Windows Outlook stores the email messages it downloads.

Don Patrick - Oct 18, 2013:

I have doubts about the future of chatbot-email. The reason one uses email is that people have busy lives and aren’t always available for comment, but you always hope for a quick reply. Chatbots are online 24/7, so if I had a technical question about a product, wouldn’t it always be preferable to visit the chatbot online and get instantaneous answers?

Hi Don, one thing I can say about 8man is that he seems to have more unfinished projects than I do.  However, his quick and dirty demos often stimulate my thinking about the possibilities.

I do think we can say that the younger generation (digital natives?) are indeed abandoning email in favor of ‘social media’.  It is pretty clear to me that one reason Twitter effectively closed their API with OAuth was to shake off all the bots, swarming around it like flies.  In the early years, Twitter was extremely fertile ground for creativity, now less so.  I don’t think we can declare email (RSS feeds or XMPP instant messaging) dead yet.

My interest is seeing *modular* interfaces for chatbots on all common human interactive channels, even with reasonable barriers to abuse (such as cost).  It’s much less interesting for me to make a private email interface for my own chatbot, than it would be to create a service for everyone to use any kind of chatbot via email, social media, VoIP, etc.

One example of this kind of service was the failed http://www.imified.com/.  Though, I wasn’t completely happy with that because it still required too much coding for the final API interface; I’m really into plug and play.  (I love visual programming like http://pipes.yahoo.com/.  Lately, I’ve run across http://xip.hgc.jp/ the eXtensible Integrative Pipeline, but haven’t been able to try it yet.)

This particular experiment may be finished for now, Marcus… PHP, it turns out, has a free IMAP library which works nicely (on a localhost) ... That is, until you try to use it over the Internet on a shared webhost…  Seems there may be an obstacle to overcome at that point. 

Shared webhosts, take your pick, Linux or Windows, may simply NOT be supporting it, or at least it seems that way.  Not to say it is impossible, but the options may at least have been narrowed to try to avoid abuse such as inteactive spambots, I would think.

That leaves roll your own programming Tcp client and sockets, or going the virtual private server route, which of course comes with CPU and RAM resource limitations.  With that said, there are other options that I know work well.  a forum with private messages is used just like webmail… And that can work with A.L.I.C.E. quite well.

Got it!

> http://www.quora.com/Mailing-Lists/Is-there-any-turnkey-service-for-converting-a-conventional-mailing-list-email-group-into-an-API

Is there any turnkey service for converting a conventional mailing list (email group) into an API?

I’m not so much thinking of standard mailing list management functions, but rather tracking subject lines (topics) via feed, and even search feeds of text bodies.

> http://www.cloudmailin.com/

“CloudMailin allows you to receive any volume of incoming email via a Webhook. You are given an email address that will forward any incoming message to your app, as an HTTP POST, within milliseconds.”

Marcus Endicott - Oct 24, 2013:

> http://www.cloudmailin.com/

“CloudMailin allows you to receive any volume of incoming email via a Webhook. You are given an email address that will forward any incoming message to your app, as an HTTP POST, within milliseconds.”

> http://www.deliverhq.com/

“Reliable email delivery for web applications. Send and receive email from your web apps with ease.”

> http://www.mailnuggets.com/

“Send emails to your remote scripts over HTTP POST using custom @yourdomain.com addresses.”

http://www.chatbots.org/ai_zone/viewthread/315/P105/#16170

In another thread Jean-François Battistini has mentioned he is using EASendMail SMTP Component to interface with his Harumi chatbot.

> Mail2Webhook.com

Receive Email As Webhook
Process incoming emails directly in your web application — a regular form post.

Thanks for keeping on posting these things. Once and if I manage to install the Curl c++ library to add GET/POST functions to my AI, I think I’ll use cloudmailin or mail2webhook as an intermediate to read incoming emails.

I also thought this service was interesting, as it seems to offer email-to-facebook gateways and all sorts of other connections: https://ifttt.com

APIs are all well and good, but frameworks for integrating APIs are another matter….  Cloud generally comes in 2 flavors, commandline and SaaS.  IFTTT.com is an integration SaaS.  There are other integration SaaS, mostly for business use ala Salesforce.

The main problem I’m having at the moment is using APIs which require handshake authentication, like all the APIs at Mashape.com.  I have really enjoyed visual programming with Yahoo Pipes, another SaaS that plays relatively smoothly with IFTTT; but, I’ve found no fix yet for using Yahoo Pipes with Mashape APIs, for instance.

I would very much like to hear about other strategies people use for integrating APIs, and in particular disparate APIs requiring handshake authentication.