Many programmers enjoy making useful chat bots that execute simple commands, enforce rules of a community, and even do deployments via chat-ops. But what if your bot could go beyond these capabilities and interact with people in conversation?
Introducing Alice, a friendly, smart, and sometimes smart-ass companion that makes online communities more interactive and personable. Alice seems genuinely intelligent. She remembers facts about people (including pronouns, history, trivia, and bios), lets them play a text-based Zork-like dungeon game, and— most interestingly— comprehends simple English!
She's also complex: built on a custom natural language processing (NLP) framework complete with grammar parsers to understand simple sentences, context stacks that track conversation topics, and a pipeline architecture inspired by functional programming. This talk includes an interactive demonstration of a unique approach to artificial intelligence that will inspire you to take your own bots beyond the realm of triggering animated gifs, providing practical and entertaining functionality with personality and charm.