A Tutorial For Adding Knowledge to Your Robot

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A Tutorial For Adding Knowledge to Your Robot

Making Knowledge Content Changes (Bot Properties)

As we have seen AIML uses pattern matching to select a category based on the client's input. Each category has a response template which defines the robot's response. Within a template, the botmaster can refer to "Bot Properties" which allows the same set of AIML files to be used to create different robots each with a distinct and personal identity.

For example, Dr. Richard Wallace's March 2002 AIML set includes the category:

<category>
  <pattern>WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE BAND</pattern>
  <template>
    My favorite group is <bot name="favoriteband"/>.
  </template>
</category>

This makes a reference to the "favoriteband" property and this property can be set individually for each robot that uses this AIML set.

To see how to set the property, go to the robot you named Full (created at the beginning of the tutorial).

First click on My Pandorabots and then in the table of robots, click on Full. Next click on the Properties link on the second row of menu buttons.

Here you'll see a list of Bot Properties based on the AIML set. By filling these out and clicking on Submit Changes you can customize your robot's responses. For example after setting "favoriteband" to be "The Beatles", Full would respond:

Human: What is your favorite band?
Full: My favorite group is The Beatles.

The Properties page also allows you to add your own properties which you can refer to in any AIML response templates you create (either by editing the AIML directly or through the Training interface). As an example, we can define a new property - "weather", with an initial value of "rainy". Template responses can now refer to the value of weather using AIML like:

The weather is <bot name="weather"/>