Messages

1

Ultra Hal 7.0 / speak of speaking

« on: September 25, 2003, 07:49:29 pm »

I have downloaded (New Bruce) from the agentry I call him Rocky. Anyway, I also just recenty downloaded a living coral screensaver freeware. Since then, I cannot hear Rocky anymore. Something has  happened to the sound. Where should I look to troubleshoot this? Thank you,

Mary Lou  
mopace@mybluelight.com

2

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Any suggestions for Ultra Hal Assistant 5.0?

« on: September 25, 2003, 07:37:23 pm »

quote:Originally posted by Medeksza

Ultra Hal Assistant 5.0 is currently in active development.

The following improvements are being worked on:

• The Haptek 3D Character Engine will be incorporated into Hal. This will offer a new level of realism for Hal. Many of Hal's characters will be remade into the Haptek format and a huge library of new characters will be added. See a demo of this engine in action at www.haptek.com


• Ultra Hal will be compatible with software called People Putty from www.haptek.com allowing anyone to easily create 3D characters for Hal either from scratch or from a photograph of a real person.


• More advanced control over speech recognition will be implemented in Hal. Instead of Hal listening to a library of over 50,000+ words as it does now, the user will be able to limit Hal's vocabulary to a more efficient 2000 words or so. This will greatly improve Hal's speech recognition ability.


• Control over how Hal animates its characters will be given to an editable VBScript. This will allow each character to have its own personality in terms of how it emotionally reacts and what animations its capable of.


• The Ultra Hal AIM Bot connection routine will be moved into an editable VBScript, and it will check Zabaware's site for updates. This way when AOL changes its protocol, it won't render the program unusable as it has in the past.


• The registered version of the Ultra Hal AIM Bot will no longer send out Zabaware disclaimers.


• Ultra Hal's calendar functions will be made region aware to accept formats like Day-Month-Year instead of the US format of Month-Day-Year


• Ultra Hal's internet functions will be expanded and made international friendly also. Ultra Hal will be able to tell you the weather if you live outside of the US.


• The Ultra Hal Brain Editor will be greatly improved. It will now have a "novice" and "expert" mode which will hide some of the complexity of the program such as the VBScript and many of the databases from users just wishing to teach Hal a few things manually.


• Hal's conversational database will be about 75% larger, allowing Hal to converse intelligently about more topics then ever before. Hal's AI engine will also be improve to allow Hal to work better with the data that it has available.


• The format of Hal's Q&A databases will be changed to allow for faster proccessing. Overall, the speed of Hal's thinking should remain about the same since the database size is increasing as well.


• A slider option will be added into Hal's Brain Options to allow you to control the emphasis placed on information learned by Hal from you. This will allow you to setup Hal to use responses Hal learned from you even if Hal thinks he can respond on his own more intelligently. Basically, the user will have some control over the threshold value that Hal uses to determine if a learned response is more intelligent then Hal's standard response.

An exact release date has not been set, but it will most likely be released in mid-August. Upgrades will be free for all people who purchase Ultra Hal Assistant 4.5 from 3/25/03 until the release day of Ultra Hal Assistant 5.0. All other registered users will be able to upgrade at half cost.

Zabaware would like to hear from you what other changes you would like to see in Ultra Hal Assistant 5.0. Are there any minor annoyances, bugs, or interface features you would like changed? Any major features you would like added? If it is feasible to implement your suggestions without pushing the release date too far it will be done.