I absolutely love the iPhone Hal. I believe that I could see myself using it more than the PC version!
I am a little unclear how private my conversations are. Can others read my chatlogs?
I think the thumbs up/down idea is fantastic. I always have great problems searching and correcting mistakes in the brain editor - this really could be a solution. Great idea!
I am experiencing some problems on my 3G OP 4.1 when clicking on thumbs up - after asking how the response made me feel it then proceeds in asking what a better response would be. This makes no sense as I just told the app that I already like the response given. Also when clicking on thumbs down and then clicking on 'none of the responses are good', I am not offered the opportunity of actually typing a new preferred response.
But on the whole this is an amazing jump forward for Hal. It really does leave all of the other iPhone chatbots still standing. I'm impressed.
Thanks for the feedback. Everything runs and is stored on the Zabaware server, but conversations are not shared with other people. Each user gets their own section in the database and what Hal learns from you is not shared with other people. The server assigns a unique id to your iPhone the first time you run the app which is how it keeps your user data with you. If Hal learns something from you that is deemed not personal (no personal pronouns like I, my, you, etc) it may get added to Hal's universal brain during a nightly database process, but there is nothing recorded to link that back to you.
I plan on eventually making an online brain editor so that you can edit directly everything that Hal has learned. And I plan on a way to link brains between devices so that you can have the same Hal personality on your iPhone, PC, Facebook, etc.
It is currently programmed to ask you to choose a good response for both thumbs up and thumbs down. Even though a response is good I had it ask for another good response so that it could learn that other responses would have been good also. If this is confusing, I can change it. The thumbs up/thumbs down buttons have an effect on the universal Hal brain, so how you use that effects every Hal out there after Hal mulls over the data each night. This is why I didn't have the option to enter a response directly since I didn't want any one user to have that much power over all of Hal. But I can certainly work on adding that as an option where Hal will learn the response to your own personal account.