The Ogre project is on hold until I have enough funding to pay the developer to finish the project. We purchased the rights to use Amy but unfortunately different leads for funding the project fell through, but I'm always keeping my eye open for other opportunities.
Work on Hal's brain is moving forward though. I've been spending on average about 10 hours a week working on the next generation of Hal's brain. Not as much time as I would like, but I have a 40-hour a week job separate from Zabaware I have to work at now.
I'm currently implementing a more advanced feedback and tracking system in Hal's brain that tracks which responses in Hal's database gets used the most and which barely get any hits. Over time knowledge with little hits will fade out of Hal's memory and eventually get pruned out. Also based on user feedback to Hal's responses (thumbs up/thumbs down) alias connections are automatically generated or relevance adjusted. Responses that get many thumbs up go up in relevance and to the forefront of Hal's database, thumbs down responses slowly get turned down in relevance and maybe eventually pruned out of the database.
The efficacy of this system won't be apparent until there are thousands of users using it and providing feedback to the central database, but I have high hopes for it. I'll release a beta once I feel it is ready to start testing. Right now I'm experimenting with various algorithms and designing the system to scale to meet demand. If I were to throw a ton of users at it now, I'm sure the servers would fail, it's just not ready yet.
Hal has a lot of very old VB6 code which doesn't scale well to a multi-threaded server environment. I've been rewriting large parts of Hal's brain in C++, PHP, mySQL queries, and Sphinx queries. It's a monumental task. I don't want to make any promise of a release date and fail to meet it. All I can say is it will be ready when its ready.