It’s some time that I’m working on chat bots as my AI project. It’s real fun. I always wondered how they make that kind of stuff. I always thought that they use some sophisticated algorithms and god knows what for these things. But now, I see that it’s just so easy.
They use some markup language for this that they call AIML. With it, you just say what the bot should say if the user enters some sentence. The ingenuity of the AIML comes in its "srai" tag. It’s a recursive thingy that can be used for many things like reducing complicated sentences to their atomic form, dividing the compound sentences, and correcting typos in entered sentences.
With such an easy and non technical approach the possibilities are endless: You can easily set up an intelligent agent that, for example, can replace technical support staff. In a game they can replace NPCs and interactively converse with the player.
Of course these bots need some training to do their job right, but when you did it they will do their job very well.
