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AIML

(Artificial Intelligence Markup Language)

AIML was developed by Dr Richard Wallace and has been around for quite some time. There are many implentation of it such as ALICE bot and various Chatbots.

I'm quite new to the robotics hobby, but it seems to me that what a good robot needs is the ability to receive speech commands from the user and either reply to them or act upon them. There is currently no software available that is decent enough to allow a smooth conversation. Let me clarify, when I say a smooth conversation, I mean taking speech in, processing it and presenting it to a "lookup" engine to reply to it, such as a chatbot, not an intelligent conversation! (programming and computing power a still not nearly advanced enough for that).

The best speech engines I have found are either, Microsoft SAPI 5.1 or higher (accuracy isn't too bad, program is free) or Dragon Naturally speaking 9 (accuracy is better and more usable than SAPI, not free).

It is simple to have a program speak to you using Text-to-speech. In VB, you simply assign the text string to the sapi engine and it reads it aloud.

Chatbot programs:

Most Chatbot programs are command line or text input based. A few program developers make use of text-to-speech. Which I feel is a shame to have developed a good AIML program and not have it read back the answer to the text input.

Having said that, I have found one programmer who has put text to speech output in to their program. The program is written in C# (C Sharp, which is a mixture of C and Visual Basic in the .Net platform). The program is called AIMLgui and is written by Nicholas H. Tollervey in 2006. His website is ntoll.org. Unfortunately, he has abandoned the development of the software and it has been made freely available under the GNU license.

I have modified his original program to fix a problem with the text-to-speech code and also add a return focus to Text Input box after Go button is clicked to allow speech input to be more fluid.

Download the modified version and code here

Zip 3.5Mb

Extract the zip file and execute AIMLgui.exe.

If you have a copy of Dragon Naturally speaking, you can use it to write the words into the text box and then say "Go" to enter the text and have the chatbot reply.

This is not perfect by far, but I am working on developing this program from where it was left with hopes to use it with a robotic head I am building.

Any assistance with the program would be most appreciated!