Three months after release 2.0, we are very proud to present version 2.5 of Chatbots.org.

Awards

We’ve researched the AI award landscape and identified six awards: The Loebner Prize, the , British Computer Society (BCS) Machine Intelligence Competition, IVA Gala, Terasem Turing Prize and BotPrize Contest.

Please note that these awards might not relate to chatting with artificial entities. In some cases, chat could even be explicitly excluded. In fact, these contests award the best-created AI and not necessarily the best-copied human like ‘chat’.

Nevertheless, all awards aim at entities that act as human beings in certain situations; it’s always some kind of a Turing Test. By including all of these varieties, we’ve anticipated a future of interacting, acting, mingling and speaking with virtual humans, just as human beings would do. 25 years from now, we won’t be able to notice the difference. Therefore, we envisage that some awards will become more similar or even merge.

Furthermore, we’ve also created a link to the AAAI Awards pages which focuses on personal achievements awards within the Artificial Intelligence industry.

All participants of all awards are listed. When a chatbot is listed, it’s possible to click through to a more detailed description. In the directory tab, links to all honours and awards as won by this (chat)bot have been included. Check i.e.: Jabberwacky (check image below).

As all information has been structured, we are capable of collecting any information that relates to AI competitions. We’ve also added separate frames with ‘Most Awarded’ and ‘Most Awarded last 3 years’. Did you know A.L.I.C.E. is the most awarded chatbot ever? However, since three years Ultra Hall Assistant is the frontrunner.

Many thanks to Xander Verduijn who has done a great job researching all chatbots, even back until 1991. Xander, you’ve made a great contribution to the worldwide chatbot community. On behalf of this virtual community I’d like to thank you for your involvement and perseverance.

Featured profiles

Many professionals in our industry have been around for sometime now and they have always been willing to share their knowledge, put in their energy, or even invest their money. Therefore, we’ve created a features profile page in the Community area to showcase them. Within a couple of months, these profiles will show up on the home page too. This is not an award, nor ranking or competition; we’d just like to give these professionals the credits they deserve.

We’ve approached them to register on Chatbots.org, in order to create a public profile, if not already done so. Please see below in alphabetic order a summary of all current feature profiles:

• Wendell Cowart developed the Chatterbox Challenge. As per version 2.5 we offer Chatterbox Challenge integration on Chatbots.org and we would like to expand this feature in the future.
• Roger Davie AKA ‘Freddy’ on several forums. Roger maintains the Chatterbot collection, one of the best chatbots resources available nowadays, hosted by AIDreams.
• Ehab El-agizy took over The Chatterbox Challenge by Ehab from Wendell and he created an awesome database driven website, which includes a forum. Ehab is very creative at integrating his pages into other websites, including Chatbots.org.
• Robby Garner set up the Robitron discussion group on Yahoo (hence the name ‘Robitron’). Currently, this group has more than 400 members and is one of the most dynamic forums in our field.
• David Hamill is currently running the Robitron discussion group.
• Dr. Hugh LoebnerDr. Loebner is the sponsor of the Loebner Prize, ‘The First Turing Test’. Since 1990, this award has gained a huge reputation in the industry and it’s hard to find a page about chatbots without a link to his website.
• Vittorio Rossi developed a virtual humans forum which doesn’t specifically focus on chatbots but more on ‘virtual humans’ in general. We are looking forward to see how virtual humans and chatbots will merge in the future.
• Richard Wallace, who doesn’t know him? He invented AIML, the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language. He’s the brain behind A.L.I.C.E., a chatbot which has been awarded 16 times so far, and in 2000 Dr. Wallace launched the ALICE A.I. Foundation to promote free AIML software. Richard is very supportive of anyone moving the AI industry forward and has been of great assistance to Chatbots.org.
• William Wynn is the owner and founder of AIHub.org - a community site for AI enthusiasts and for anyone new to the field. In addition, William maintains the Google Knol on Chatterbots. The structure of this page is far better than any Wikipedia page. However, these pages are never complete so please feel free to contact William to suggest any modifications.

Finally yet importantly we’d like to highlight Simon Laven. As a teenager, Simon has developed Chatterbot Central, a comprehensive website which includes a Robotic Toystore, video’s and DVD’s. Unfortunately, as we haven’t been able to track him down he hasn’t be able to create his profile yet. If you happen to know Simon: please forward this posting to him.

Anyone else missing?

If you’re convinced other people (or maybe you) should be part of this listing, please don’t hesitate to respond below, or contact Erwin.
Once more, this list is not part of a competition, it isn’t objective at all, and we didn’t undertake a profound nomination and selection process. It’s a list of individuals, which in our opinion have been or still are of value to the worldwide chatbot community. Therefore, we’d love to hear your suggestions if you believe someone is missing.

More profiles
Soon, we’ll introduce a comprehensive public listing of chatbot professionals, individual experts, across the world, or anyone who’d love to contribute to the AI industry. Register now if you haven’t already done so. Please use your full name (no alias or just your first name), upload a nice portrait without sunglasses, and make sure your profile is complete. As soon as we approve your profile, it will appear in the public listing. Each comment you post, will be automatically linked to your personal profile page and that’s how you can start building your reputation.

Furthermore, we’re also working on academic profiles: highly intelligent individuals working at AI or AI related themes, across the world, at universities and research labs. These individuals usually tend to avoid publicity, but we’d love to connect their ideas. We’ve just started this investigation, so please feel free to add any researchers you may know to the response form below.

Design

The previous version of Chatbots.org mainly focused on navigation design, introducing tabs and the ‘account console’ (which appears on top as soon as you login). Version 2.5 is highly focussed on improving the graphic design of the web site.

We’ve finetuned the 3D feeling (thanks to eCreation for this first setup), reintroduced the country animations (which temporary disappeared in version 2.0), and introduced the second layer navigation (this will be visible in the next version of Chatbots.org).

Additionally we’ve introduced an RSS balloon animation, a new animated favicon and a very cute Twitter animation for our tweets. It also makes some twittering sounds, but you’ll have to be patient . All animations are very subtle, they move just sometimes, it shouldn’t disturb you but it might trigger people to be curious what’s beyond the click.

We contacted Arthur de Wolf yet again, who has created, animated, and implemented this awesome graphic design within one week. Years ago, Erwin met Arthur when he was working at the international headquarters of an IT company. Arthur soon appeared to be very talented, even though he was quite young (and he still is, still young, still talented, but now also experienced).

Thanks to

Thanks to all people who contributed to Chatbots.org! Most of you have been mentioned in the above section, however there’s someone we’d like to highlight and thank once more: Boris, thanks for your ongoing support! None of this would have been possible without you!

What’s next?

One of our next priorities is to identify all companies around the world creating chatbots on a professional basis. Moreover, we would like to be of value to these companies by creating a highly professional online visibility and displaying their chatbots to potential clients.

Furthermore, we’ve started to get in touch with all universities across the globe which are developing artificial conversational life.

In addition, we’re always on the lookout for clever editors: editors who’d like to write articles for Chatbots.org. Currently, we’re looking for freelance AI research editors and book reviewers.

This story is just starting to unfold. Why don’t you join us and let’s make fun together!