Glad to be of service. I hope you can make something of the script; shouldn't take too much playing around to make it work. Try making a .brn file that pairs people's names with the gender (like the hello detection file, "howdy","hello"). Search it (as you would the hello file) and you will get the gender of the person. Then you choose a sentence from the gender response file.
Hope that makes sense to you. As I said, with a little playing around you should figure it out.
About the senses, I wouldn't exactly call speech recognition and text comparison "senses". The text that Hal "understands" is simply used to apply Hal's "thinking". To truly have a sense of sight and sound, Hal would at least have to have a "memory" of the image or sound, and a reaction to the sight or sound. There are also many kinds of reactions that Hal should have, including emotional, psychological, physical(represented in the GUI), etc, which then have an impact on future learning. This allows for a reinforced learning that can learn by trial-and-error on its own, and also be taught directly through conversation and various teaching methods.
I apologize if this sounds offensive, but I've had an interest in computer AI and I agree that Hal needs to have more 'sense' to it! We should be able to develop something truly useful by now, but the computer industry is more concerned with speed, connectivity, price, and entertainment than with true innovation. We should be making computers more useful and helpful for practical things, then just making them to give us more features and options that basically help us to waste time more efficiently. Granted, there is one exclusion I would like to mention. The windows calculator, which is really what a computer still is.
That's my two cents, so a penny for your thoughts. And don't forget the change.[:p]
