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« on: December 06, 2004, 10:33:27 am »
Kaane,
I watched and waited to see if there were any replies to your message. I assumed that people would jump all over it, but I guess that just because I understand all this doesn't mean that everyone understands this or even cares if this were possible.
This is very possible to do because both mIRC and pIRCh use very easy, yet powerful scripts, powerful almost to the point of becomming a time-bomb on your PC waiting for a disaster.
I could write an addon for mIRC that would allow you to use Ultra Hal, but I question it's performance or abilities in different situations.
I was using IRC in the late 80's, even before mIRC. In those days, IRC was becomming so popular that the servers were congested almost constantly. Keeping all the servers sync'ed was next to impossible.
During those times, Hal would have been a nightmare.
Today, it would be much easier to do, because IRC has turned into a place where young kids hang-out and idle in a channel 20 hours a day and then spend the other two hours talking about how "L33T" they are.
Hehe... kids, teach them to edit a text file and they are suddenly a hacker [|)]
In a perfect situation, Hal would work great on IRC, but many things would play into this. Channel size, channel activity, etc...
I am assuming that you are just wanting Hal to talk with your 'chan' users? This would not be complicated, but lots of preparation would be needed before slapping the Hal bot in a room.
The bot would need to be trained for the environment. No one on IRC speaks anything that resembles common dialog. Your bot would have to learn about all the abbreviations; afk, ltns, lol, bbl, etc..
This would be a huge list. Making Hal understand these things is possible, but would take some time.
If you wanted to program Hal and then turn his learning ability off and set him up in a 'chan', then you shouldn't have any problems. However, I don't know that I would want Hal learning anything from a 'chan', especially if Hal has OP status and the ability to control the 'chan', you could lose your chan to anyone who comes along and knows how to teach Hal. If you are good with VB scripting, then you could write some things to prevent this from happening, but it wouldn't be 100% fool proof. mIRC scripts are so loose and insecure that they are almost dangerous. A good scriptor, can do anything he/she wants including over-riding a k-line or g-line. IRC is their backyard and you are just a guest there. I would be very careful of any scripting you do on IRC.
If you are just wanting Hal to sit in a room and talk (text) with people, this is not complicated at all. But then, there are many IRC bots that already do this, so I am assuming that you are wanting to utilize the TEXT-2-SPEECH abilities of Hal?
This is where it becomes a little more complicated. A few years back, people were writing scripts for IRC that would SPEAK the text in the chan, but it was a failed effort, because of the different dialog used on IRC and the fact that the pronounciation of each line of text is determined by each person's PC. You may already understand what I am saying, but in case you don't, let me clarify:
In order for your computer to do TEXT-2-SPEECH, you must have a speech engine installed on your PC (TTS). So, unless you have this engine installed, you would not hear anything Hal said in the chan anyway.
Even if you do have the TTS installed, you would want to make sure that Hal spoke in common english because each person listening to Hal has their own dictionary file on their PC that contains the pronounciation. Just because you have altered your dictionary files to understand and pronounce what Hal is saying, deosn't mean that everyong else in the chan has taken the time to add new words or correct the pronounciation of the words that Hal is talking.
The only real fix for this would be a global dictionary file located on the server where your bot is running, but then you have opened a new can of worms getting each users IRC client to point to this dictionary file. I am not saying that this isn't possible, in fact with mIRC or pIRCh scripting, it's very possible. You would just have to write an addon script for mIRC and have all your channel users download it and install it.
Then you would control the pronounciation for all users. Hehe.. lots of work.
I know this is long and drawn out, but I wanted to elaborate on the issue a little bit.
So, to answer your question, NO. I don't think anyone has taken the time (Lots of time) to add Hal to IRC, nor would I really want to spend the time doing something like this, because of the limited use and complications involved regarding Server/Client issues.
If you would like to tackle this project yourself and you need ideas for the mIRC scripting and approach to this, let me know, otherwise, I would just get a regular chan bot (without speech) and just use it to talk to your users.
-=Rick=-
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