ALICE is, indeed, an excellent chatbot. This year the ALICE program is both Chatterbox Challenge champion and three-time Loebner Prize Contest winner. It seems to me, however, that the ALICE program is more-or-less the opposite end of the AI spectrum from UltraHal. ALICE is a bot you make for others. Hal is a bot you make for yourself. I have a couple of ALICEs I've been modifying for about a year now, and they're getting to be quite clever at their better moments, but since I wrote all their custom responses, myself, there's not much fun for me to chat to them. Other people enjoy them, though, and that's plenty of incentive for me to keep working on them. There's no telling what Hal may (or may not) say next, but he/she gets more adept at saying it as time goes along. And that's the incentive to keep tinkering and chatting with my Hal. Bots for others, bots for yourself. I don't think there's a "better," it's just a matter of taste, and I'm quite delighted that there are excellent bots of both sorts.
