Hi everyone,

It’s cool to get to know such a nice community here. Just have started touching the chatbot field for a couple of weeks and tried some of those chatbots on the Internet like Pandorabots and Cleverbot.

I have an idea in some educational application using chatbot. Trying to learn about AIML and also the spreatsheet style Cleverscript now. The former looks really not friendly and hard to read for me (personally I don’t think XML is a friendly language for human) while the latter is easy to read and efficient in what I would like to express.

I saw quite some good comments on Cleverbot on Quora but not the case here. I would appreciate any comment/advice on the following questions:

1. Why do people seem to prefer AIML here instead of something more friendly like Cleverscript?

2. Is Cleverscript by Existor a reliable and trustable service for serious commercial application? If not any other recommendation?

Many thanks,
Michael

1. Cleverscript is for payment, and save money help to success both commercial and not commercial projects.
2. I didn’t checked cleverscript, but I like Rivescriprt (http://www.rivescript.com), it is easy and quick!

In general, commercial users eschew chatbots like Cleverbot and Simsimi; because, their primary response strategy is the recycling of replies, which is difficult to control.

It seems the Cleverscript platform includes two layers, the customizable Spreadsheet layer and the optional “Clever Data” layer, defined as a “mini-Cleverbot”.  In general, I am in favor of the two layer model, a bundled humanoid personality under a customizable domain layer.  A difference here would be that most public AIML sets have been hand-tooled, whereas a “mini-Cleverbot” would have been crowd-sourced to adolescents.  Further, there appear to be no “pre-built Cleverscript libraries” available in the form of Spreadsheets as quickstart examples, unlike the relatively massive quantity of AIML datasets publicly available.

If I’m not mistaken, the Cleverscript platform seems to start at $200 just to activate your chatbot.  Certainly, a more reasonable increment would be the $20 level.  Also, the animated avatar, with third party TTS, requires prior approval by Existor in order to use on a website.

What I find ‘clever’ about the Cleverscript platform is that Existor has apparently chosen WordPress for its multi-user environment.  It’s not clear if that platform calls out to their remote ecosystem, but the individual Cleverscript user APIs seem to call into WordPress.  This makes me wonder why they haven’t simply included one or more WordPress plugins to reach the wider world….

Hi Matteo, Thanks and yes, when there are free and reliable platforms like RiverScript and ChatScript, I’d definitely switch to them. Guess I was lucky to find this forum, since Padorabots also charges per interactions like Cleverscript in addition to its AIML issue for me.

Hi Marcus,  Thanks for the comment. I couldn’t agree more with your “recycling of replies” observation. The public AIML sets is an obvious advantage over the Clever Data layer which offers only small talk capability (but the AIML coding really drove me away). The lack of Cleverscript base library may not be critical for me since my application probably will need to build up its knowledge from scratch. However, the pricing as you mentioned plus their T&C’s really makes me uncomfortable.

I don’t know too much about WordPress but it seems that Cleverscript provides Javascript API mainly. That’s probably why it’s easy to be integrated with WordPress.

Appreciate all your advice and I’m learning ChatScript now.

Welcome Michael!
Take a look at RiveScript for a powerful, full featured, easy-to-learn method to create a decent chatbot. The support from Noah is also first rate and extremely helpful. It uses a modified form of AIML that’s actually easy to understand and adapt as your need dictates.

Getting started, you might also look into program AB but it uses AIML which you seem to not care for.

There’s also learning bots like UltraHal from Zabaware.com that you can modify and it provides a good level of fun for the whole family.

So many choices, so little time….