Very true Patty.

I knew going into the CBC it was not about winning, because out of the gate I was really still in the alpha stage with Marie. However, in the past two days I was able to identify and fix several major bugs in her engine plus add new conversational content that otherwise would have taken much longer.

The CBC is invaluable for developers to get real-time feedback from users while gaining exposure for their bot. In my case, Marie did not even start out as a chatbot but an interface to Google’s search and mapping API. The idea of the bot came by a means of entering your search query in a unique and fun way. I came to this website to see what the state of the art in chatbot technology was at the present. I was awed and amazed by what I discovered and the community here have been a wonderful and supportive group.

As a web designer and software developer for many years, I have always shrived to think outside of the box. Now that Marie is off and running very little can stop her. Since her engine is cross platformed and client based, her speed is as fast as your machine and browser will run. Additional advanced features are in development now that will use cloud based data integration that will extend her knowledge base way beyond the static data she is using now.

Lots of fun and excitement ahead

Just a quick note.

Marie has been take off line as we enter the final development stage of our commercial product Slide Agent. Thanks to everyone that helped with the tesing of our prototype bot Marie. Your feedback was invaluable.

Stay Tuned.

But Laura, the CBC is only half way through. They are currently judging for 10 bots to go through to the next round. This is made up of the 9 best scorers plus at leat 1 other. If you take Marie offline now, she will have just quit the contest.

Steve’s right, Laura. The voting for Best New Bot goes on till the 21st. It would be a shame to have Marie pull out now.

Don’t quit now, the best is yet to come. You get the best conversations during and after the finals.

I really appreciate everyone’s encouragement and concern but as I told Wendell, Marie was a very limited and incomplete build of a much more complicated commercial product. I had thought about updating her with the next version of the engine, but my time is at a premium right now and I have a release date to meet on the commercial product. Unfortunately the decision was made to pull her from the competition. Understand this was not my decision alone as other partners are involved.

It has been fun and I hope to maybe have an entry for next years CBC that will be more worthy of the competition.

Thanks again everyone.
The members here are truly the best!

The chatter robot contest judges, by their agreeable comments in the transcript seem to be leaning towards sending My Marie to round two.  I was wondering, (politely asked for the sake of chatter robot contest history, meaning no ribbing, no joking, and no criticism intended or implied toward Laura in this question) has any chatter robot master ever made it to round two of the contest and then not accept, or would this be a first in chatter robot contest history?

8PLA • NET - Mar 7, 2012:

has any chatter robot master ever made it to round two of the contest and then not accept, or would this be a first in chatter robot contest history?

In 2010, I won the first round by a large margin of points and was promptly disqualified for using AIML. That might have been a first.

Okay, I have reconsidered and decided to just let Marie roll on towards the finals.

If she does make it into the top 10, I will have to attribute the score not by her vast knowledge but her winning personality.

Also.. I don’t want her to be remembered as the first bot in history to drop out before the second round.

Glad to hear it, Laura. Trust me when I say that you won’t regret it.

I figured, what the heck. I can’t spend any more time updating her because I am working on the Slide Agent product, so she is all on her on at this point.

The only problem is I can’t get the DNS updated for her sub domain because of problems with my hosting provider so I had to move her to a new home.

http://cloud.ibookmusic.com/marie/

I am trying to get Wendell to update the link but I have not heard back from him yet.

The discussion wandered quite a bit from it’s original intent, so I moved that part of the discussion here.

The CBC was a fun, learning experience. It was not the environment that Marie was designed for but it was interesting to see how she reacted to some of the questions. Marie served a great purpose in beta testing some of the core routines in her engine. Now Marie will remain in the current version as we are moving forward with Slide Agent the Commercial Virtual Assistant.

I have a demo that I am currently developing for a major insurance company. If all goes well this may be Slide Agents first customer. I will be posting a thread and link to the demo once the customer clears it.

Stay tuned..

Hi Laura,
At last, I also gave Marie a try. As you might recognize in the script below, probably a typical non-US conversation. Therefore, probably instructive . My comments are within brackets….

Marie: Hello, Erwin!
How may I help you this evening?

Erwin: where is leiderdorp (Leiderdorp is a city in the Netherlands, I was expecting that the link with Google maps would work here since there is only one ‘Leiderdorp’ in the world).

Marie: “where is leiderdorp” is an interesting statement Erwin.

Since I am still learning, I am not sure exactly what you mean by where is leiderdorp?

Erwin: who is laura patterson

Marie: Since I do not know Laura Patterson personally, I have found references from several biographical websites that should help.

(this one is certainly interesting! You were not even listed in the right hand panel! You should certainly add this to your script! (to my humble opinion :-s ). )

Erwin: who is ‘erwin van lun’

Marie: Since I do not know ‘erwin Van Lun’ personally, I have found references from several biographical websites that should help.

(Just trying…. )

Marie: Sorry, my speech functionality is not yet implimented for your browser.

(after I ticked enable speech in Firefox 10.0.2; spelling mistake in implimented )

Erwin: which browser should i use?

Marie: “which browser should I use” is an interesting statement Erwin.

(An answer would surely be helpful here.)

Since I am still learning, I am not sure exactly what you mean by which browser should I use?

——————-

What I LOVE about Marie:
-default speech turned of, and the options to turn it on
-the script history
-the simple but nice layout, beyond many just techie implementations I’ve seen.

Why don’t you add Marie to add our directory?
http://www.chatbots.org/directory/insert_chatbot/

Hi Erwin!

Thanks for taking the time to give Marie a spin. I am sorry that Marie is not as data aware as she could be, but this version is a very early beta that I was pushed to release in order to make the contest deadline. I really wanted to test some of the functions that I developed for my commercial product Slide Agent. There is no comparison between Marie and the Slide Agent product other than some of the functions and scripting that was developed for parsing the user input and establishing topic categories. At one point I had pulled Marie from the CBC because I knew that as a Chatbot she was not fully developed enough to compete.

Marie does know who I am, but you have to use my full name or Laura Marie. You could also ask who is your bot master, programmer, developer or even creator. The reason I did not hook Laura Patterson is there are simply way to many Laura Pattersons out there. The google maps will work better by just entering the country, or US city. I did not have international countries in the data variable. Again, she is far from a finished product and I did not have the time to update her with the Slide Agent product in development.

I will be talking to you able listing the Slide Agent bot in the listings once the demo had been released and cleared by my client. Until that time, I decided to leave Marie online so others can play around with her.

Thanks again!