Introduction
This is a brief tutorial describing how you can create and add knowledge to your
robot. A successful robot will give responses that appear to be coming from a
human. Your goal as the botmaster is very simple:
"Build content that induces the visitor to carry on conversations with your
robot for as long as possible!"
You do this by creating a variety of potential answers to various questions, or
re-directing a conversation to new topics that the client finds interesting -
always with the goal of continuing the interactions as long as possible.
Examples of such robots can be found at the links below:
Pandorabots allows you to extend the knowledge of your robot via a programming
language called AIML. The goal of this tutorial is to teach you the
minimum of AIML necessary to make your robot "smarter" and
better able to carry on a realistic conversation.
This Tutorial is a draft - and unfortunately has errors and omissions. Better
versions will be forthcoming. Some of you will argue that it would have been
better to postpone publication - yet the cry for some kind of documentation was
just too much. Please accept my apologies for this draft's roughness. Please
mail comments and problems to the attention of Dr. Doubly Aimless at info@pandorabots.com.
More details on the information in this tutorial can be found in the references
listed at the end. In particular, the
latest version of the AIML specification contains many of the
details omitted in this document.
The robots discussed in this document, and on www.pandorabots.com, are based on AIML and spring
entirely from the work of Dr. Richard Wallace and the A.L.I.C.E. and AIML
free software community based at http://www.alicebot.org.