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!

Feedbots & Feeding Chatbots

As someone holding a degree in Psychology, and with a background in technology, I'm starting to feel like a psychologist for robots....  

I am presently working on two lines of research aimed to converge on conversational agents, or chatbots, for the mobile market.  I have been working on technology to convert books into knowledgebases (Project VagaBot).  And I have been developing feedbots to feed realtime, prefiltered information into knowledgebases (Twitter, Bots & Twitterbotting). 

Knowledgebases may take different forms, but form part of the conversational agent, or chatbot, "brain".  The off-the-shelf conversational agents I have been working with include Conversive Verbots and various AIML platforms including Pandorabots.  Lately I have also been looking beyond the so-called stimulus-response systems to the new generation semantic systems, such as Stephen Reed’s texai.org, Sherman Monroe’s monrai.com and Ben Goertzel's novamente.net.

Most basically the semantic systems strive to convert natural language into SPARQL queries and SPARQL queries into knowledgebases.  (Note, relational databases may be converted into RDF, and become accessible to SPARQL, with D2RQ.)  Goertzel's OpenCog Project is notable for attempting to lay-out a long-term roadmap or blueprint for the creation of what he calls "Artificial General Intelligence", otherwise known as Strong AI, and at least partially funded by Google, leading to what Ray Kurzweil refers to as a possible technological singularity, or point at which robots will begin to in effect build themselves.

So-called Twitter bots (Twitterbots) are most basically feed bots (feedbots), although there are a wide variety of bots being referred to as Twitterbots, not least the infamous friend adder or follow-bots.  Most basically, feedbots feed web feeds into or out of Twitter, the currently most popular feed exchange, or feed interchange.  I don't really count a simple blog feed ported into Twitter as a true "Twitterbot".  For me, a real Twitterbot must actually "do" something, have some unique functionality.  The hands-down favorite for feed manipulation is Yahoo Pipes.  I've been working for a number of years with Yahoo Pipes, and have become a skillful Pipes developer, creating hundreds of Pipes.  However, Yahoo Pipes alone is not enough to create a "brain" or "artificial intelligence"....  

I have found the Zoho Creator web-based software-as-a-service a convenient way to host my databases "in the cloud".  These databases generally consist of what is sometimes referred to as a "taxonomy", but is more precisely a "faceted-classification".  The faceted-classification as a database forms the basic "intelligence" of intelligent feed bots, or Twitter bots.  Multiple databases may also be used in tandem, a technique I refer to as "dual iteration", to sharpen or increase the intelligence.  And, specific feed bots can be combined to create cumulative meta-bots.

I have previously blogged about developing my proprietary “green travel taxonomy” over many years, which is in fact a complex faceted-classification in the form of a database that currently drives the @greentravel1 Twitterbot. greentravel1 is also available on Blogspot as greentravel1.blogspot.com.  It currently consists of 4 primary “channels”:

• #GTNews consists of Google News searches based on the green travel faceted-classification.
  
• #GTRetweet consists of analysis of the Twitter public timeline based on the same green travel faceted-classification.
  
• #GTVideo currently searches an abbreviated dataset of key terms on Google Video for purposes of scalability.
• #GTFeeds consists of an accumulated set of closely related feeds added manually. 

In short, greentravel1 delivers a continuous feed of all English language green travel news, the entire green travel related Twitter commentary, plus all new green travel videos and related blog feeds.  greentravel1 effectively enables monitoring of the bulk of cyberspace in realtime for the critical issues facing the sustainability of tourism today.  (And, to see this sustainable tourism intelligence presented dynamically on a country by country basis, for all 240 “countries”, simply visit the Destination Meta-Guide.com 2.0.)

Special thanks to Prof Dr Marc Cohen of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and the RMIT Master of Wellness Program for support of this research.

Project VagaBot Update August 2008

Following up on my previous post of January 2008, “Corpus linguistics & Concgramming in Verbots and Pandorabots”, you can now see the demo of this VagaBot at http://www.mendicott.com . The results of this trial were not satisfying due to the limitation of the VKB engine at verbotsonline.com not being able to process consecutive, or random, responses from identical input or triggers, basically tags. In other words, the responses with identical input hang on the first response, and not cycle through the series of alternatives. Apparently a commercial implementation of the Verbots platform does allow for the consecutive firing of related replies. Thanks to Matt Palmerlee of Conversive, Inc. for increasing the online knowledgebase storage to accommodate this trial and demo.

Dr. Rich Wallace has recently blogged a very helpful post, “Saying a list of AIML responses in order”, on his Alicebot blog at http://alicebot.blogspot.com . After considerable fiddling, I have successfully installed Program E on my Windows desktop under Wampserver (Apache, MySQL, PHP). I have also found a very easy commercial product for importing RSS feeds into MySQL. Next I will try to bridge the RSS database and the Program E AIML database with Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) using the previously mentioned xsl-easy.com database adapters… as well as implement Dr. Wallace’s "successor" function on the Program E AIML platform. Once I get the prototype working on my desktop, I will then endeavor to replicate it on a remote server for public access.

The long term goals of Project VagaBot are to create a conversational agent that can not only “read” books, but also web feeds, and “learn” to reply intelligently to questions, in this case on “green travel”, in effect an anthropomorphic frontend utilizing not only my book, "Vagabond Globetrotting 3", but also my entire http://meta-guide.com feed resources as backend. I am not aware of another project that currently makes the contents of a book available using a conversational agent, nor one that “learns” from web feeds. I hope to eventually be able to send the VagaBot avatar into smartphones using both voice output and input. I would be very interested in hearing from anyone interested in investing or otherwise supporting this development.