I am intrigued by your idea. If I understand you right, you want to have the bot ask a sales person questions about conversations they had with customers, and then weigh those ideas as successful or unsuccessful or in between, and then use an algorythm to anaylize the data and report the successfullness of the sales person to make the sale or rate how bad they did.
First off, HAL is programmed by Robert Medeksza and he owns the copyright to HAL himself. You would need permission from him to create something for sale. Although I'm not sure about the legalities selling the scripts and/or custom brains. I think it was discussed in the forum before?
However, I think that using HAL would not be very useful for your purposes. I think to get the most accurate analysis, it would be best to use an electronic survey such as a web form in which both input and analysis would be handled by a php or perl script.
Here is why I think this: First off, even speech recognition is not accurate enough to catch all words perfectly. Though higher end programs like Dragon Naturally Speaking are known to do an excellent job. Furthermore, the analysis of the spoken or even typed in input to the AI can also be mis-interpreted by the AI who then could ask a very off-topic question. This is something that many of us here are still struggling with. Von Smith's XTF brain is probably the best at staying on topic though I've heard good things about Ziggy too. But, even then, you need something that stays specifically on topic and the HAL program, no matter how good the brain, will still tend to drift after awhile. Thus possibly confusing the sales person and especially giving an inaccurate set of data to your analysis program, which would then give inaccurate results of the data. You would need an application that is very specific to your task. I don't think there is a chatbot out there that can do this without programming from scratch.
So, I would suggest that you consider a more conventional approach to your project. However, if you still want to use an AI for interviewing sales people, you could. I have personally had experience with such topic-specific AI systems before. However, they left me frustrated because their questions often did not address the more important things that needed to be reported. You see, you can't anticipate every possible response of interaction between customer and sales person. So some important questions may not get asked and therefore the resulting data may not be as accurate. Yes, this is also a problem with online questionaires too, but at least there you can ask for open comment. With a chat bot, you would need to prevent the AI from asking or inticing further interaction from the human after the human makes their extra comments, and have a way to store those comments as extra data.
Now, to that end, a Visual Basic or C++ programmer can develop a specific application for you, though it can cost. It can use a speach engine for the AI's voice. And a Speech Recognition program for taking verbal answers from the sales person (though I think that they could also type in their answer too) and converting them to text. The program could use an algorythm to then determine a series of next questions and so on until the end of the interview. The program would then store this information and then sent it to your analysis program, or even analyse and verbally give the sales person tips on their performance based on the AI's analysis of the interview. This can NOT be done with a chatbot like HAL. You'd need a specially design program for this type of application.
In fact, such systems have been created, such as Clarissa for the Space Station:
http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=dn7584But again, these were specifially programmed applications, not chatbots you can download off the internet or purchase ready-made.
I hope that my reply may be of help. I work as a web developer and tech writer, but in my off time I enjoy researching Artificial Intelligence systems that are available to the average person. I haven't programmed in Visual Basic 6 SP5 in ages but I have done some stuff. I've also at one time programmed Eliza in C, though I was stupid and lost the code.
But I've been playing with programs like Eliza since working on TRS-80 Model IIIs in BASIC. My first speach chatbot I tried was Dr. SBAITSO that came with my SoundBlaster 16 stereo sound card (remember those, guys?
Also as part of my work, I have written about advertising online and other ecommerce topics. And as a consumer who has had experiences with everything from simple voice menu systems to actual simple expert system AI-based interview/menu systems via telephone. As a person on the opposite end of things, I can probably see what the sales person would feel like while using such a system and know what my personal experiences were with these. That is basically what I based my answer on.
I know some may not like advertisers or people who promote selling. There I can see why as there's just so much spam going around. In fact, some have already tried to spam this board with frivoless attempts to advertise on-topic. However, after seeing your site and your project, I admit to being rather intrigued based on my own experiences with seemingly similar systems and felt I would contribute my ideas.
I hope you don't mind the long post.
And good luck with your project. It would be interesting to see which way you go with this.
