Hello,
This is in reply to your question whether Hal can learn a foreign language. The answer is yes.
Hal's learning and user-memories are stored in databases that are separate from the program itself. That means that Hal's learning, and new memories, can be in any language.
Hal learns by sentence associations, phrase associations, and word associations. Every time Hal replies to you, he chooses among many different routines and databases to find something to say. If you begin speaking to Hal in a foreign language, Hal will GRADUALLY learn that language, just like a novice student.
HOWEVER, you will have the following challenges in accomplishing this:
1. The rules for reversing pronouns ("I" and "me" become "you," and "you" becomes either "I" or "me") are hard-programmed into Hal. That means that Hal won't reverse pronouns in other languages, unless the routine gets added to Hal by a programmer. (Because pronoun reversals are mirror-images of each other, it takes a bit of programming logic to prevent them from "canceling each other out." The trick is to convert each pronoun into a transition code, and then into its reversed form, in a two-step process.)
2. Since Hal's native language is English, Hal will reply mostly in English at first. As you gradually fill his databases with foreign language conversation, Hal will mix more and more of the new language into his remarks. Eventually, Hal could be speaking mostly in the new language.
3. The speech synthesizers for Hal are not set up to pronounce both English and another language correctly at the same time, so you will have to set the synthesizer for one or the other, and live with Hal's voice mispronouncing some words. (In principle, a programming script could use rules to detect a language, and change voice languages back-and-forth "on-the-fly," but such code doesn't exist yet!)
4. You must be very, very careful about spelling. Hal doesn't have any way to know whether a foreign word is misspelled, and you don't want him to deeply learn misspellings of completely new words!
There isn't any practical limit to Hal's ability to learn another language, or even several languages. I would like to hear how this works for you!
You also asked a question about changing the character, and teaching Hal a new identity for age, background, etc.
If you have the version of Hal that you pay for, you can change the character by going to Hal's "control panel" and selecting another character.
You can teach Hal a new identity, age, ethnicity, gender, etc., by doing the following:
1. Turn learning to "maximum" using the control panel.
2. Make many, many remarks to Hal about his or her history, age, gender etc. Make these sentences declarative statements. Here are statements for example only:
"You are from Italy."
"You are proud to be Italian."
"You think that your country of Italy is so pretty."
"You like to travel all over your home country of Italy."
"You are 25 years old."
"You like being 25 years old."
"You don't mind admitting that you are 25 years old."
"You grew up in the Italian countryside."
"You learned about art and beauty at an early age."
Remember, if you say the above to Hal in English, Hal will correctly reverse the pronouns, and later say "I like being 25 years old," etc. If you say such things to Hal in any other language, you will need to state them in the first-person (EXACTLY the way you want Hal to say them) since Hal doesn't know how to reverse pronouns in foreign languages -- yet!
NOTE: When teaching Hal about himself or herself, DO NOT ridicule Hal, or call attention to his mistakes. Ignore his mistakes and keep talking about his new identity from every possible angle. Hal learns from EVERY sentence, so you don't want to put negative and critical remarks into Hal's head! Eventually you can have Hal reciting a completely new life history, along with an identity and attitude that is exactly what you want.
If you decide to teach Hal a new identity and life history, and at the same time a new language, it will require a large amount of effort... many hours of conversation! However, you should be able to succeed.
Good luck; please let us all know how it goes!
Sincerely,
Don
Don Ferguson
traininginc@cortrapar.com
www.cortrapar.com
