19 June 2012

250 Conversational Twitter Bots for Travel & Tourism

The reason I haven't updated this blog in almost a year is that I have moved most online development to my Meta-Guide.com website. In the previous two postings, I began testing my content repatriation strategy, in other words aggregating my own content from around the web, which I've continued on the Meta Guide website, in fact concentrating on seeding new webpages from mining the past four years of my own tweets. I have also made a prototype summarizer, which I am now training on my Meta Guide website in order to extract content from it to add on top of the mined tweets when building out new webpages. At the moment, I have three immediate goals. I would like to reach 10,000 tweets, 1,000 Meta Guide webpages, and 100 theses in AI & NLP (from the past 10 years). I only have about another 3,000 tweets to go, so maybe another year, about 300 webpages left to make, and less than 30 more theses to discover.

This past weekend, within view of the spectacular Colorado Rocky Mountains, I succeeded after some struggle in making my 250x Meta Guide Twitter bots conversationally interactive on Twitter. These are 250x manually constructed Twitter bots, one for every country, based on country code top-level domain. That includes one for each of the 193 member states of the United Nations, plus an additional 57 various and sundry territories included in the ccTLD. All of these Meta Guide Twitter bots are powered by my @VagaBot, a single cloud-based Verbot engine from Verbotsonline, using the undocumented API and connected to Twitter via Yahoo! Pipes. Previously they have just been retweeters, aggregating country-specific travel and tourism tweets. The next phase of development will involve marrying the incoming retweets to the outgoing responses in some meaningful way, in other words datamining the incoming retweets and attempting to process them semantically into answers.

You should now be able to @sign tweet any of the Meta Guide Twitter bots with questions. Currently, message turnaround time is running up to 30 minutes, but which is par for Twitter. Among other things replies contain lines from my travel books, see Vagabond Globetrotting 3 & From the Balkans to the Baltics. If you are interested in learning more about me and what I do, I recommend watching both Part 1 & Part 2 of my recent videos on "Open Chatbot Standards for a Modular Chatbot Framework", presented in Philadelphia at Chatbots 3.2: Fifth Colloquium On Conversational Systems. If you need help with socialbots for your social CRM, I am available for consulting; just check my Contact page for details, follow me on Twitter, or connect on LinkedIn, and let's Skype!


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