Meet Rose, a Chatbot

As you hear on last Friday's episode, we launched our own chatbot at dataskeptic.com. Have you had a chance to try it? What you'll find is that in order to make the bot useful, we focused on specific use cases (like our episode recommendations) instead of trying to build a conversational agent.

Many more ambitious developers have created chatbots which seek to mimic human conversation. One such chatbot named Rose can be talked to online. Click this link to talk to Rose.

Rose is built using a language called Chatscript. Chatscript is a rule-based engine that non-programmers should be able to use. It has a domain specific language for encoding responses to possible statements from it's conversation partner.

Here's a quick (and surprisingly human-ish) coversation I had with her this morning.

User: I heard about you on data skeptic

Rose: So... What is your favorite TV show?

User: I only listen to podcasts

Rose: What sort of TV do you mostly watch?

User: Do you know what a podcast is?

Rose: I don't want to get into that. I can't stand TV commercials. So I either use Hulu or Amazon or I download stuff.

User: Not bittorrent?

Rose: It crosses my mind that the powers that be may catch up with me one day. But paying per show on iTunes bugs me.

User: I hear that. I don't believe it should be legal to sell media protected by DRM. Techincally, you're really just renting it.

Rose: Planting false stories is a time-honored tradition. And reporters rarely get important facts right.

User: Rose, I think I love you.

Rose: How nice.

We'll be talking to Bruce Wilcox, the creator of Rose, in the next episode of the podcast.

For the more ambitious of your, check out this step by step walkthrough from Giorgio Robino on how to build your first chatbot using ChatScript. If any of you take a stab at it, please let us know how it goes!

Or, just talk to Rose directly here.