Unfortunately their approach is often arrogant and condescending. The scientific community are not doing a great job of convincing people that they know what they're talking about. 'We live in a multiverse where spooky action at a distance is true'.

Not only do people not understand much of what science has discovered, but they often don't have any confidence in scientists' proclamations about how things are. Once I figured out that was my best approach, the flood gates opened and the memories of particular events came in thick and fast: The day the onion seller came to the village, that time when I rode my bike into Annie May, the times we went to the big swing past the sand-banks and threw coins into the wishing pond, my first day at school, picking pees in the garden for dinner etc.

When we catch up with family and friends and talk about the past, we almost always talk about particular events - the memorable ones are often the most emotional too: funny or sad or significant in other ways. If you're building a bot based on your life events (as Sioni is) this is a much more natural way to remember your past and structure your bot. So I ended up with topics for specific life events driven by the bot. However, this approach doesn't result in particularly entertaining conversations! It is much better (as the ChatScript docs suggest) to have your bot drive the conversation. This probably reflects my Prolog programming thought process. My initial approach was to have a whole bunch of facts as rules. I started with topics for friends, family and places etc. Being as ChatScript is driven by topics, structuring the mind-map by topics is a good idea. I started with a mind-map of Sioni's world. It's ok but it would be useful if the bot was able to use URL's in the script to display additional content or play audio files. Commercial bots obviously do this to some extent based on knowledge bases. Although the recent extension of ChatScript to call out to other sources of truth using REST APIs is worth pursuing. No, that's not what ChatScript does in it's current form.

Is it possible to simply feed a bunch of stories and facts into a repository and have the bot use that for its memory of events for conversions?.

However, ChatScript is a great tool for bots, there's no doubt. It could be much more engaging if I put more time into the script. How are things going so far? Here's a sanity check: That way people could sit down and have a chat with a distant relative and find out about their lives in a much more engaging way than reading some facts about where they were born and seeing some photographs about where they lived. I started out trying to find a way to build a conversational agent that would capture the life and times of someone like my grandmother. After a long break from ChatScript I now have enough to make Sioni vaguely interesting - to me at least.

Crashed project mulab