Human-Chatbot Haptic interaction

Researchers from Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University have been investigating haptic interfaces. Haptic interfaces allow a users to touch, feel, manipulate, create and/or alter simulated 3D objects in a virtual environment. Users can experience tactile sensations such as textures, friction and vibration. As many of you keep asking, you may be able to pet Emma in the not-too-distant future. Now if I could just get her to purr...

Say "Hi" to Pixel and Ella

Emma has some friends she'd like you to meet. They aren't cats, not even virtual cats, but they're both chatbots and they both work in libraries. The first is Pixel, created by Dee Ann Allison at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries. Pixel is a very cool bot that answers questions about UNL library resources and services. You can chat with her here: http://pixel.unl.edu/.

Another chatbot friend is Ella, Wadsworth Public Library's perky new virtual librarian. You can chat with her here: http://www.wadsworthlibrary.com/bot/virtuallibrarian.cfm.

Please take some time and talk with both of these bots; just like Emma, every interaction helps make them smarter.

Midnight in Terminal 1

It's 1:30 am local time, that's 4:30 for everyone back in Ohio. Kris and I are stuck overnight in the San Francisco airport. All the flights heading back East were full this evening. After LITA, we thought it would be nice to relax for a few days in the Bay Area. I also wanted a few days off before starting to tackle the mountain of work that needs to be done on our bot. There are two goals for the next 3 months: 1. improve the way Emma guides searches, and 2. improve her ability to deal with random chat. I know what needs to be done to fix the former, that's the topic of a separate post. There are a number of files available from the free ALICE AIML set that should help with the latter, but they need testing and some customization first.

So what goes on in an airport after the last arrivals and departures? Not much. A few other folks with early morning flights are getting settled in for the night. There's a really cool zamboni-like vehicle cleaning the carpets. I'm seriously tempted to ask the driver if I can take it for a spin up the concourse. Looks like a lot of fun. Maybe not, though. It's cold in here, Kris estimates around 60 degrees. Plenty cold without adding wind chill and the carpet cleaner goes fast. SFO has free WiFi. Good thing, since sleeping might be tough. All the seats have arms, so one can sleep sitting up or stretch out on the floor. Sitting, thanks. With any luck we'll be home tomorrow, then it's back to work!

Catbots take St. Louis

Michele and I presented at LITA yesterday. It was great! We had an enthusiastic audience and some really good questions at the end. I wish we could have taken a picture of their faces after we introduced Emma and she began speaking. We demonstrated general questions, passing searches, and some of the fun things she does, like find local weather forecasts. I went to some interesting presentations and will be using what I learned shortly. Can you say "Mobile version of the website?"

Emma goes mobile

My apologies for not blogging in such a long time. Lots and lots going on at MPL (if you haven't already heard, Katie Spotz is coming to visit in October!) and lots going on with our humble bot. Michele McNeal and I will hit the road again this month to present at LITA in St. Louis, Pandorabots and I have been spending long hours putting Emma's code on Google so other libraries can use it, we're rewriting large portions of the code, and, just for fun, Michele helped me make a mobile version of our Catbot. Michele wrote the code, I just plonked Emma into it. Scan the QR code with your phone, then favorite or bookmark it. Flash and text to speech don't work with the mobile version (yet) but it does everything the web based bot can do. Remember to turn off your pop up blocker.

Adeena Mignogna - AIML Content Management

Adeena Mignogna surveys, compares and contrasts AIML editors.


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Jeff Remy - improving virtual agent performance

Jeff Remy of VirtuOz at Chatbots 3.1.


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