About time someone made this program!

[Larry_Omaha]

I'm more than a little excited to see that somebody has put together a product with these capabilities.  I put together a small enterprise to try to do this more than a year ago using open source programs and they just were not up to the task.  Recognition rates were way too low to be at all functional.  Even if this is not perfect, it appears from a quick tour of the forum that there is a lot of input being solicited for improvements.  I'm just amazed that it took so long to get something like this launched.  I wrote an Eliza-type program in the '70s when I was a teenager that ran on a mainframe but I didn't even have access to a monitor. It was all on a printer. It worked, and tricked at least one kid (hint: add a lot of swear words to the vocabulary) but I was confident that its capabilities would be quickly exceeded. I was wrong.  Now I have gray hair and have moved on to other things.  But maybe this will open the door to real AI development of the sort that I'm looking for. I will see.

[Art]

First, Welcome Larry!

Hope you enjoy your visit and will become a regular
contributor in time.

Hal has been around for quite a long time albeit through
various incarnations / versions.

It might not be spot on in all areas but for a program
of its type, it's hard to beat.

Hal learns from its interactions with the user and over
time will develop a personality of it's own, more or less.

A lot of users prefer to type instead of risk mistakes
made through a still imperfect voice recognition technology.

It will take some dedication and time to end up with a pretty
good chatbot but Hal will get there and will probably
surprise you and what it comes up with!

If you have any particular questions, try the SEARCH feature
at the top right. For any questions not answered there feel free
to post it and one of the many talented folks here will be
happy to assist.

All the best!

[Bill819]

Larry
Your timming is perfect or maybe that is why and how you got to this site in the first place.
Ultra Hal just won a World Wide competition for programs of this type and it was long overdue to win in the first place.
Most of the newer programs out there use precanned answers aka Eliza types. I must admit though they now have hundreds of different answers and some even link one idea to another but Hal is greately different from all of those. It dissembles your sentence and then trys to give you an answer based upon what it has learned. In the beggining it is very childlike as it knows very little about everything but soon will start to pick up on the topics that you talk about the most. It actually takes some time depending on how much you spend with it on a day to day basis.
There is no reason that after a year or so of intensive interaction with you or others that it may actually start to sound alive.
Bill