Alice Mango

Scientists are trying to create real Artificial Intelligence, where the computer actually thinks for itself instead of following pre-programmed responses. Some are going so far as to recreating the human brain using electronic parts. But here’s a technology that has been around for quite a few years now, where you can talk with a computer and it talks back. Well, types back would be more accurate (although you can download a version that speaks back).

The “bot” I’ve spoken to before is named ALICE, which stands for Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity. It is an award-winning free natural language artificial intelligence chat robot. The software used to create A.L.I.C.E. is available as free (”open source”) Alicebot and AIML software.

Try talking to A.L.I.C.E. just like a real person, and see which responses sound like a human and which sound like a machine. The bot uses a language called AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) to form responses to your questions and statements. The programming behind it is very interesting (in a nerdy way), but I won’t get into that here. For now, let’s see what humor we can derive from this bot. As you might expect, some of the conversations can get random.