I just came back from the Chatbots 3.2 conference in Philadelphia.
http://chatbots32.eventbrite.com/ I presented Zabaware's askthecandidates2012.com site and the reception was generally positive.
There were a lot of interesting presentations this year. Of interest to many people here is that Haptek's creator Chris Shaw was there and I got to meet him for the first time in person after almost 12 years of Zabaware selling Haptek's components. As many people here probably know the Haptek engine hasn't been updated for almost 10 years now. Chris said he thought Haptek was ahead of its time when its made and left to work on other projects, but he said he is coming "out of retirement" to work on new things again. So expect to see new things from Haptek sometime in the future.
I also found Marcus Endicott's presentation interesting. He talked about modular and open standards for chatbot development so that components from different chatbot vendors could easily interoperate. I've always had a modular approach to programming Ultra Hal and would definetely follow interoperatibility standards should a standard organically emerge or be agreed upon.
I volunteered to edit all the conference videos again this year, so they'll be available to watch in the coming weeks.
