Hello there. I’m making an ecommerce website with a chatbot programmed into it. The website utilizes PHP-MySQL.
Design
The chatbot interacts with the user to understand what product he/she is looking for and provides a link to the suggested product pages.

My Skill Set:
I have working knowledge of PHP and have worked with Databases fairly. Relatively new to AIML too,but I do grasp the concepts fairly.

Business Logic(tentative)
The Database stores product information. The database is queried according to how the user species his product details.

Current State:
I’ve made a database in SQL and also installed and configured Program-O(Mr. Dave Morton-fantastic program btw. Saved me a lot of the hassles)

The Problem:
How to I get the bot to fetch product information from the database tables? Is there a way to sort of mix code an AIML response with an SQL query? Any tips or ideas on how to code the bot brain?
Deadline
This project will have to completed by the next month.(Yes,I may have sort of messed up my time :( )
Any guidance will be truly appreciated. Time is of the essence I would truly truly appreciate a quick reply. A link or tutorial to resolve my quandry too will do

Hi and welcome, Siddharth.

Most likely, the best way to handle what you want would be to create a custom AIML tag to obtain the data, and set certain predicates with the returned values. I can definitely help with this, but a little more information is needed to be able to point you in the right direction. If you feel more comfortable keeping this information private, please use the “E-mail Dave” link under my name to send me an email. I’m quite willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement, if necessary.

Thankyou for replying Dave
I have as a matter of fact sent you an email with the link the original post. Firstly I’d like to give you an update:
I’ve checked out the wordpress plugin and while the plugin works perfectly,I was unable to connect it to my locally installed chatbot (I’m using a local XAMPP server to host my project). I did find the forum post but unfortunately the forums seem to be down :( . It would be great if you could guide me how to connect the wordpress plugin to the local program-o instance as I will be demoing the project with sample responses ,tomorrow.

As for the additional information about the project I’m still in the early phase and as soon as they are finalized I will surely email them to you.

Siddharth Gupta - Feb 19, 2015:

Thankyou for replying Dave
I have as a matter of fact sent you an email with the link the original post. Firstly I’d like to give you an update:
I’ve checked out the wordpress plugin and while the plugin works perfectly,I was unable to connect it to my locally installed chatbot (I’m using a local XAMPP server to host my project). I did find the forum post but unfortunately the forums seem to be down :( . It would be great if you could guide me how to connect the wordpress plugin to the local program-o instance as I will be demoing the project with sample responses ,tomorrow.

As for the additional information about the project I’m still in the early phase and as soon as they are finalized I will surely email them to you.

Update 2:
The forums are back and I was able to connect the bot! You folks are awesome!
PS:
I did alter the bot url in the lib/chat.php file,but did not alter the bot-id. Forum did really help me out!

I’m glad that you were able to get it working. I contacted Liz about the forums, and she had them up and running within minutes. If you need any more help with the WordPress plugin, let me know, and I’ll pass it along to her. Sadly, she doesn’t frequent this forum, but I do, and can get hold of her pretty easily.

Hello Dave,
I need your help again. As my previous posts suggest,I’m using Program-O and the Wordpress plugin too.
I’ve played around with responses and I need your help on the following:
1. What version of AIML does Program O use?
2. Are the Alicebot/Pandorabot files directly compatible with Program O? Or is there some AIML tool I could use as an alternative to program the AIML for Program O. (I did checkout the Teach GUI under Program O and I need some additional tags which I think it does not support(please fill me in if it does) )
3. How do I get to store a PHP query as an AIML response,so that when the answer is fetched the PHP query is automatically interpreted?

Dave Morton - Feb 19, 2015:

Most likely, the best way to handle what you want would be to create a custom AIML tag to obtain the data, and set certain predicates with the returned values. I can definitely help with this, but a little more information is needed to be able to point you in the right direction. 

My logic is that lets say if the user asks for a product x,I store a query in the response,select * from table where id= x and this is interpreted by php. In case you can think of a better way to this please do guide me.

In case you need a more descriptive idea of the project do let me know and I will email a the concept description of the project to you.
Thanks in advance