Culture Chatbots

Lillian was a virtual librarian. She was designed to answer user queries about books, and particularly library holdings. As well as being able to tell a user if a library holds a particular book she could also:


- Deep link them to the library's own holdings page for the book, which may have availability and reservation data

- Direct them to another library that holds the book if the local library doesn't

- Direct them to the right page on Amazon if the book is not held

- Advise them of books by a particular author held

- Advise them of books on a particular subject held

- Tell them what the book is about

- Tell them what other people thought of the book

- Tell them what books people like who also liked this book


You could ask Lillian questions like:



- Do you have a library near........ (e.g. Bury) - is a good idea to get Lillian to find you a nearby library before looking for books

- I live near ....... (e.g. I live near Bury) do you have .......... (e.g. Snowcrash)

- Do they have ...........

- Who wrote ...............

- What is * like

- What is * about

- What else is like *

- What else did * write




She is not programmed for general chat.



Lillian combines:




- The Discourse™ Natural Language Interface and Chatbot engine from Daden Limited

- The Sitepal™ animated avatar and text to speech system from Oddcast Inc

- Web services interfaces from:

o Talis

o Amazon

o OCLC



Lillian is a web native, web delivered application, requiring only a browser with the Flash plug-in installed to work (Flash plug-in only required for avatar and text-to-speech).


The current version of Lillian is only a proof-of-concept. As such she lacks the security, resilience and error trapping that would be found in a production system, and only implements some of the knowledge cases which would be required in a publicly accessible system.


A text only version is also available for low-bandwidth use.