After almost seven months of hard work, we are proud to present version 2.6 of Chatbots.org. This version features multiple forums, a sophisticated account mechanism, and a sleek design of sub navigation, body, and footer.

Forums

Chatbots.org facilitates forums for communities working in the field of human-like conversational AI. We’ll start with two forums: Robitron AI, focusing on artificial intelligence, and Chatbots.org Forum focusing on Chatbots.org itself. Furthermore, we’ll have an overview page listing all our forums.

Robitron is a forum discussing natural language processing, artificial intelligence, chatbots, chatterbots, conversational systems, robots, androids, Turing test and Loebner Prize contest. This forum has featured members like Hugh Loebner (founder of the Loebner Prize), Richard Wallace (inventor of AIML) and David Levy (last years’ Loebner Prize winner). Robitron Forum is affiliated with the Robitron Mailing List which was setup in 2002 by Robby Garner. This forum is moderated by David Hamill and Robby Garner.

Chatbots.org Forumis our support forum: Bugs, content errors and feature request can be posted. In addition, it has an area for enquiries relating to the industry. In future, Instead of answering enquiries from the press by e-mail, we prefer to answer these questions via the Chatbots.org Forum.

All forums have their own RSS feed and, as opposed to many forums on the web, we also offer daily, weekly and monthly digests.

new forums

Chatbots.org is happy to facilitate and host forums about:

• Technology fields such as:
  • speech technology
  • character animation
  • human identification

• Academic fields such as:

  • philosophy, psychology
  • linguistics
  • socio-robotics
  • computer science
  • robo-ethics

• Application areas such as:

  • gaming & entertainment
  • contact centers
  • e-learning

This service is free of charge as long as you have a good plan in place and its content can be made public. Click the ’+’ tab (Add Forum Tab) for more information.

Additionally, we’ve worked on our technology architecture. Wanna know some technical details? We’ve created a Virtual Private Server account at HostGator in the US. This allowed us to setup our own mail server. The main benefit of having your own mail server is that you can read log files and you are therefore able to report on the delivery status of messages. This will allow us to report e-mail delivery status to members. For example: Someone who has cancelled his e-mail account without changing his e-mail address in Chatbots.org, will be notified on the website as soon as he logs in (hey, something is wrong with your e-mail address!). This will allow this member to change his e-mail address and continue to receive Chatbots.org e-mail digests and notifications.

Thanks Boris for building the forum, and Arthur for implementation of the VPS server & digest module, well done!

Account pages

Our new account pages are smarter than ever. It will allow you to manage your account details even better than before, it will improve your visibility and you can manage your subscriptions.

Furthermore, we’ve introduced a mechanism for individuals to use an alias instead of their real name (although we still recommend using real names, like 95% of our members do). The new account pages should accept all latin names as we’ve used the Wikipedia page on alphabets derived from latin characters. The result is that a name like Éřẃĩñ vän̈ Ĺũń (does anybody know how to pronounce this ? :-p) will be accepted without any problem.

To complete this job, we’ve also added a mechanism to avoid duplicate screen names (we don’t want to confuse Joe Smith with Joe Smith).

Check out the new account pages for yourself:
http://www.chatbots.org/account/bio
(or register if you still need to register).

Don’t forget to add your RSS feed and/or Twitter details to your profile and see what happens!

Thanks to Arthur de Wolf for his awesome design and accuracy during the development of this feature.

Design

Aside from our most prominent feature our website (the header), the whole website has been redesigned. However, you might hardly notice the difference with version 2.5. Have you seen our new footer for example? And our second level navigation, visible in the account pages and in the forums tab, which provides a 3D experience (like a lath which sticks out to the front)? 

Additionally, we’ve introduced many ‘visual devices’ such as the contribute button and alerts which will pop up if irregular events occur. And for anyone who hates animations, we’ve even added user options to your profile to turn off our Twitter Bird animation and its cute tweeting.

All of these new features of our new design should provide visitors a better user experience. Have you forgotten what our previous pages looked like? Check our history pages for a little bit of nostalgia.

Thanks again to Arthur de Wolf for this awesome masterpiece!

Coming Up

As announced so many times before, you can expect our ‘research’ tab in the next six months or so. It turned out to be an enormous job, a lot more than we anticipated for. We’ve identified hundreds of journals, thousands of books and even tenth thousands of academic papers (although not really ‘identified’), 17.000+ universities and we haven’t even started to identify research groups working in the area of human-like conversational AI. Xander and Karolina have already been working on this project for months now, we’re having progress, and it will be fantastic!

Shortly, we’ll also introduce our Advanced Membership Program (again, we’ve promised this before). This program is designed for professional chatbot (virtual agent) developers worldwide. This paid program gives them several benefits such as increased visibility, obtaining more clients and attracting new talent from the market place. This program should enable Chatbots.org to continue to fulfill its mission to progress the chatbot industry worldwide, which in return helps the developers.

In the mean time, Jetty is focusing on content and editing my English copy. I’m learning, however I still have a long way to go, I am still far from being a native . Thanks again, Jetty.

We continue our mission to advance human-like conversational AI and we’d like to keep you close. Will you be there when we need you? We’ll be there when you need us! Don’t forget to register today.