Chatbots ...
viraptor: I had a bit of fun with chatbots. If you want OS and easy way, you have 3 choices really:- AIML engine- MegaHAL engine- proper parsers (most of them are written in lisp-like languages for some reason)Now it really depends on what you want to do - only waste someone else's time? MegaHAL will do just fine. You can feed it conversations all the time and it will learn to interact in some environment rather quickly.If you want some basic scripting, you should look at AIML-based soft. You can write your scripts and basic expression reduction in XML. There's a "javascript" tag in the specification, but noone really supports it. I map it to python functions in my bot and it works quite well. You will never parse more exotic sentences though - just basics. And your bot will not learn automatically.If you want to use it for something really useful, look at the http://www.generation5.org/ articles. You'll find a lot of code that's easy to port to your favourite language there. Serious language parsers connected to something like word-net are the only way to go if you want good quality. And you need to create a lot of stuff yourself - afaik there are no standard response libraries like alice, because the parse format is not really standardised.