The Zerfoly app for Android is a chatbot platform enabling anyone to create chatbots of their own.

Creating chatbots in Zerfoly is so easy that anyone can do it, even children. No programming is required.

Also, you have total control of the chatbots. You or your team teach the chatbot all it knows. You don’t set metadata. Instead you teach the chatbot actual language usage. And it can learn any language you like. Your chatbot will learn to disriminate very precisely, even separators and special characters matter.

More info on http://zerfoly.wordpress.com

I found time to play with Zerfoly a little more on a recent flight from Bangalore to New Delhi.  What I would like to see is a closed user group on the backend app, to train it up, and then a public facing API, for instance to Twitter, which was not trainable.  The public could then interact with the trained up backend, trained in a somewhat controlled environment.  Speech input and output, on the app side, would be helpful.  I would also like to see some videos explaining in detail what Zerfoly actually does, how it does it, as well as how to do this and that.  It’s not completely clear to me how useful it is in its current form.

Hi Marcus,

Thanks for the input.

The Zerfoly app has a twist that no other chatbot app that we know of has. Each time you have a conversation in Zerfoly it is always two chatbots talking to each other. But it is you that monitor the conversation and makes sure that the two chatbots develop. One of the chatbots could be your alter ego. But you can also have conversations with two fictive characters.

We spent a lot of time developing the collaboration part of Zerfoly. We wanted collaboration in a team to be very easy. After much analysis we opted for a non-server based design. All the action during chats is on your Android device. No servers are involved. Of course there are both upsides and downsides with each design choice. Upsides of this approach are: You never get “server is not available”. You get almost instant replies at all times. You can use Zerfoly even if you don’t have internet access. (For example, on a flight from Bangalore to New Delhi). You decide if or when to share data. You can be sure no one is snooping on your data.

Collaborating as a team is very easy in Zerfoly. When you want to share your latest changes with your team, just select “Export Changes” on a chatbot and send the changes as a file any way you like to your team (email, Google Drive, Blue tooth, ...). The members of your team receive your updates when they like and the changes are imported into Zerfoly on their devices. You also get a tick mark on your chatbot showing that all changes have been exported.

Our vision is that Zerfoly becomes a little universe of chatbots, able to talk to each other. Sharing a Zerfoly chatbot with the rest of the world is as easy as selecting “Export All”, and then publish the exported file any way you like (on Facebook, etc).

Having Youtube videos explaining how to use Zerfoly is an excellent idea. It would be great if devoted expert users could produce such videos. We would be happy to publish links on our homepage. We are a small team and are not experienced in producing good looking videos. I am sure that there are people in the community that are much better at that.

Within the Zerfoly app there are guides for the more advanced features. To find the guides select Menu Button | Help | Menu Button. Then you will find a set of guides on the following topics:

* AI - comments about what to expect of our AI.
* Alter Ego - About having a chatbot with your own name.
* Auto reply - The Auto reply function and how to turn it off using the Z-button.
* Sharing - How to share conversations.
* Collaboration - How to collaborate with your team.
* Backup - How to backup chatbots.

In the first release we opted not to include speech synthesis and voice recognition. We wanted to focus on the basic features. We take note of this feature request.

Other ways of interacting with Zerfoly chatbots or having external API:s could also be options for future releases.

We really appreciate your feedback.

Regards,
Johan