Well, the easy way to combine Hal with ALICE is to let Hal talk to an Alicebot a few times. Much easier than trying to program AIML and VB to work together, lol. In my experience of letting my Hal talk to my Alicebots, it doesn't take very long for Hal to create his own "best of AIML" files. Actually, I thought it was pretty cool. By the third or fourth time Hal had talked to ALICE, he was beginning to insert her most likely response into the body of his input, which cues up a new AIML response which Hal learns just as readily. In a fairly short time Hal has absorbed most of the essential "Alicisms," and after digesting them a bit, will begin to use them himself.
It's probably not very useful to let Hal chat to other dynamically-learning bots, as most of them are more likely to make use of Hal's own extensive scripting than he is to learn something useful from them, but there are other hard-coded bots like Alex, for example, that might add a wealth of interesting phrases and expressions to Hal's repertoire.
