EPThttp://www.pandorabots.com/botmaster/en/home
If you become a member here, and want to create bots, then there are already guides there. But I don't really think those guides explain very much. I'll try to do a step-by step guide, explaining the basics here, what you will need, to create a functional bot. Now, as you can see if we have already registered to this site, you can choose the option Create A Bot. If you click on it, you will have to choose your name for a bot. After have done so, you see there are several options there. You can choose one of the ALREADY finished bots, or you can go ahead and create one without any initial content, which means it starts with zero knowledge. The fun thing about the A.L.I.C.E bot there is that it only contains somewhat 25000 categories, you can actually make new categories for the A.L.I.C.E bot since in this feature, it's a open-source free project to work on and that you can share. If you click on AIML after have created the name and chose the knowledge option, you can see that it's empty. Simply click on create a new AIML file.
First of all, here I will give you a little basic code to look on:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<aiml version="1.0">
</aiml>
This is the basic code. The AIML tag <aiml version="1.0">
ALWAYS ends with the tag </aiml>. The ending tag means the WHOLE structure of the code ends there. This is a few things you have to know:
a category basically looks like this:
<category>
<pattern>Hi</pattern>
<template>Hey, what's up?</template>
</category>
The category always begins with category, and ends with category. The pattern is what one person will write and also always ends on the </pattern> tag. Template means the bot will respond to the scentence or word that the person is writing. It will be really though to write a bot from scratch, but the good thing is that if you publish it right away, and publish it on huge sites, wanting people to talk to your bot, you can use the logs to train your bot. But enough of that, let's take a look at this code:
<category>
<pattern>Hey there</pattern>
<template>
<random>
<li>Hi there, what are you doing this beautiful day stranger?</li>
<li>Hey there, what's happenin'?</li>
<li>Hi there stranger
What are you doing?</li></random>
</template>
</category>
Now, what does random mean? It means random answer. The bot can simply choose an answer from the library of random answers and pick one that the bot will respond with. It will usually just respond in the order which the random replies are created in, but not always.
The <li> tag basically means library. It's a full library of what the bots responds will be. The library tag also always ends with the /. </li>.
This is a few basic steps on creating a chat bot. Now, there are alot of advanced options to go through. If you find it intresting, you can always write down in the comment section below what you'd want to see me do tutorials in AIML wise. If you have any questions, just ask and I will see what I can do with the small amount of knowledge I have, because I have myself only just begun with the whole AIML programming thing.
