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The short answer: There isn’t going to be an AIMLBot 3.0.

However…

I have some time on my hands in the evenings at the moment so I hope to do some extensive re-factoring and development on the AIMLBot project.

The primary objective is the release of version 3.0 of the library. This article lists the aims and objectives required for this work and provides an update on a couple of my other projects.

James Ashley has emailed me to let me know that he has used my AIMLBot library in his Sophia project featured on the Code Project website.

What sets this project apart is James’s use of the new speech recognition and synthesis libraries that come with Windows Vista. His excellent article demonstrates a framework for interacting with AIMLBot chatter-bots and classic Z-machine text based adventures. This literally means that you can talk to the bot and the bot will talk back to you (or you can talk and listen your way through classic interactive fiction like Zork – a truly noble achievement!).

As James explains:

“The Sophia project is simply an attempt to bring speech recognition and synthesis to the text-gaming experience. With Microsoft’s speech recognition technology and the API provided through the .NET 3.0 Framework’s System.Speech namespace (formerly SpeechFX), not only is the performance fairly good, but implementing it has become relatively easy.”

Unfortunately for me, I’m holding off buying Vista until Apple releases their Leopard operating system. I’ll then purchase a new laptop (probably a MacBook Pro) and install both operating systems (and Linux too) to give me as comprehensive a development platform as possible (especially useful for testing web-based applications and various Mono projects).

Until then I’ll have to wait with twitching fingers anxious to get my hands dirty playing with the code demonstrated in James’s project.

Engaging in philosophical analysis is an essential (and difficult) activity for shedding light on those aspects of a problem that do not obviously fall within the realm of software engineering. This is especially true when trying to understand concepts such as “meaning”, “understanding” and “thinking”.

This article is a demonstration of philosophical analysis by engaging with two chat-bot related problems. The first concerns the question “can machines think?” and the second examines “meaning”.

My original .NET chat-bot was written over three years ago and was based upon the AIML specifications. It was also my first project in C# and became a vehicle for me to learn about the .NET platform.

Although many people found it useful (it has been downloaded many thousands of times from this website) it was slow, not completely reliable and lacking in features.

Now that I have extensive experience and knowledge of .NET, I have re-written this project from scratch to implement several modifications and improvements.

This article gives a brief overview of these developments.