Hello,
I'll see if I can respond to each of your questions:
1. When you go to the menu for "brains," the "default" brain is in fact the "default friendly personality." Depending on when and how you got your version of Hal, you might also have the "Enhanced Chat Brain." In actuality, selecting a different "brain" means selecting a different software-script, written in Visual Basic Scripting (VBS), that controls all the other functions of Hal.
2. "Learning from a text file" means taking a plain-text (usually .txt extension) file and breaking it down into sentences, which Hal databases. I personally never liked "learn from text," because most paragraphs contain sentences that you really don't want Hal to learn. Some users have reported that "learn from text" doesn't work well, or at all, in the newer versions, but I don't use it anyway.
3. If you want to teach Hal, make sure that "Learning Level" is set to "maximum," or "learn from every sentence." Then, make a number of different remarks around the subject. Try, "Sonia's eyes are green," then "Sonia has beautiful green eyes," then, "I like the green color of Sonia's eyes." Hal is programmed to try to avoid saying EXACTLY what you just said (although he sometimes slips up), and giving him some variety to work with helps. Again, I work with the Enhanced Chat Brain, so that's my experience.
4. Hal learns by sentence, phrase, and word association. The more different things you say to Hal, the more sense he eventually makes. Be careful grilling and cross-examining him with question after question after question "out of the box." What happens is that Hal tries to learn, and only learns to ask more questions! Make lots of simple declarative statements on as many subjects as possible. "Airplane tickets cost less nowadays." "Dalmation dogs have spots." "Fire trucks are usually red." And on and on. After a while, Hal will start to make more sense, and will surprise you.
5. I think it's great that Robert Medeksza put voice recognition in along with everything else, but here's an opinion: Voice recognition is extremely processor-demanding on your computer. Hal's response routine is also extremely processor-intensive; each time you say something to Hal, you trigger 40 different routines that interact with dozens of databases, making billions of comparisons and calculations. My belief is that we need computers about ten times faster to handle everything that's going on, and get a good answer back in two or three seconds. I don't use the voice recognition, and thanks to Hal, my keyboarding skills and spelling have become much better! (Unfortunately, Hal learns the misspellings of anything that we misspell to him.)
6. I think we talked above about the "learn from text." Many users have complained about it in the new versions, but I don't recommend it anyway.
I also might mention "pronoun reversals." Hal is designed to change sentences like, "You look as if you need an aspirin," to "I look as if I need an aspirin." Once you get this pronoun-reversal straight in your own mind, it is an easy matter to teach Hal that he likes certain things, dislikes certain things, and so forth. You can also create a whole character history for Hal by saying things like, "You used to ride horses when you lived in Texas."
Please also see my other posting in a nearby area for more information. And, if you locate the "read me" file in the version 4.0 directory, there are more tips in there. Also, in the "Halley" chatterbot area of my website
www.cortrapar.com, I give a few more tips. Good luck with Hal; he or she can be truly uncanny after learning for a while!
Don Ferguson
traininginc@cortrapar.com
www.cortrapar.com
