Ten Tonne Baby

Nina Improvements

Thanks to those of you who’ve helped out testing Nina… I can imagine it’s a little frustrating at times. Just a couple of quick points – firstly, I’m rapidly expanding the vocab based on looking at the things she doesn’t understand, so it is actually very useful. Secondly I noticed that some of the pattern matching is case sensitive… this probably gives the impression that she’s way more stupid than she actually is (if you’re using unexpected case).

I think I should also add a little more variety for the confused message, as it tends to come up quite a bit right now. Also to reiterate, she’s never going to be all that clever – I just wanted her to have some kind of basic conversational skill.

Anyhow, no time to do much with her right now, but I’ll post when she gets more intelligent. Watch this space.

Posted:

November 6, 2006 @ 22:40

Kiss My Bot

I need your help! I’ve finished V2 of my chatty little MSN bot, and I need some help testing and expanding her vocabulary.

If you’re running MSN messenger and feel like helping out, then add ninarobot@gmail.com as a contact. She should automatically accept the invitation, then you can start chatting to her.

I’m logging anything she doesn’t understand, so hopefully I can add support for anything you throw at her that doesn’t quite get through. Feel free and unlimited when chatting – nobody is judging you!

Disclaimer: it’s quite possible that she’ll crash at some point, or stop responding. If that happens, just leave a comment on this post and I’ll restart the bot application and try to work out what went wrong. Also if you have any ideas for additional tasks she should be able to carry out, or things to chat about then let me know.

Posted:

November 4, 2006 @ 17:42

Categories:

Design, Development, Personal

Tags:

bots, messenger

Comments:

3 comments so far

Messenger Application Interface

A little while ago I saw a competition to build an MSN bot. I wasn’t organised enough to actually look into this at the time, but I’ve had a little time this week so have been building my own, personal, MSN bot.

I hadn’t really thought about using messenger as the primary interface to an application, but it actually provides a really interesting, human feel to interaction with an application. A little like a modern command line interface.

At the moment I’ve just been focusing on the fun parts – making it understand and respond to various bits of conversation. The intention is to use this an an interface for kicking off ad-hoc automated builds by shelling out to msbuild.

This means that anywhere you’re running MSN messenger, you’ll have the ability to kick off ad-hoc actions on a remote build machine. Along with chatting (or even flirting if it floats your boat) with a little MSN bot.

I noticed John Rayner has looked at this from the other side – how to have automated builds report their status to you via messenger conversation. I think combining the two would provide a great tool for managing interaction with msbuild, along with pretty much anything else.

Currently if you ask my bot about the weather, it calls out to a Yahoo weather feed, then tells you the forecast for London.

I’ve been at home quite a lot this week, so get to see what happens daytime in Soho. This is a shot of an outdoor tai-chi group who get together in the church yard…