The XML dialect called AIML was originally developed by Dr. Richard Wallace and a worldwide free software community between 1995 and 2002. AIML formed the basis for what was initially a highly extended Eliza called “A.L.I.C.E..” (“Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity”), which won numerous awards. Because the A.L.I.C.E. AIML set was released under the GNU GPL, and because most AIML interpreters are offered under a free or opensource license many “Alicebot clones” have been created based upon the original implementation of the program and its AIML knowledge base.
The Pandorabots platform implements and supports development of the AIML open standard. It is the most popular open standard scripting language for creating chatbots available on the market to date. A number of AIML interpreters have been written in a variety of languages and open sourced, and a number of other bot platforms support AIML explicitly or under the hood.
The AIML 2.0 specification (released as an initial draft in 2013) introduced a number of new features to the language that dramatically improve on AIML 1.x and the natural language processing power of chatbots. These features include:
The current Pandorabots AIML interpreter is backwards compatible with AIML 1.0, so platform users can make full use of old bot files. However, it does not currently support Javascript.
For more details, please read Dr. Richard Wallace’s full AIML 2.0 specification.