[alicebot-archcomm] Coming up to speed.

[Gary Robertson]

My thanks go to Dr. Wallace for letting me into this club, but I know he 
did so primarily to get me off of his back :)

I am reading everything about this technology that I can find.  I am also 
immersing myself into the technology with a "hands on" approach. I already 
have had fun with creating and implementing a VHOST on an earlier project 
of my own.  My newbie bot at Pandora is "only an egg", but later next week 
it will hopefully graduate to the status of a boiling egg.

I am especially interested in creating A.L.I.C.E.- bot projects that can 
deliver "mission-critical", or "near-mission-critical" services to company 
employees and to their customers.  To meet this goal, I find it useful to 
see A.L.I.C.E. as the wrapper, the coordinator, the mediator, and the 
director of a host of services.

I believe that beyond her clean and efficient CBR-design brilliance, the 
Internet is what makes A.L.I.C.E. most interesting; because it makes her 
very affordable, universally accessible and "real time" responsive.  What I 
find most lacking in A.L.I.C.E. so far is a marriage of what she brings to 
the party and whatever valuable content business holds dear, yet wants to 
share or to exploit.  Maybe I am mistaken, and that there are a large 
number of just such projects completed or on the way.  As I have said, I am 
just coming up to speed.

I mention all of this because I have a sense that A.L.I.C.E. bot projects 
could benefit enormously from the power of a clean and efficient way to 
supplement bot templates with returned results from calls to .cgi scripts, 
and even simple .html documents, using the standard "http:" 
protocol.   Now, I am aware of the <SYSTEM> tag and I believe I know what 
it can do - but I wonder if anyone has devised a <SYSTEM> to http:-world 
interface for unix, linux, windows and mac yet - and if so, I wonder how 
costly are shell calls to system resources and performance.

I had some recent exposure to TELLME's voice recognition phone network 
(which has as its primary client AT&T 800 Directory Assistance - automation 
that listens to requests for listings and speaks back the phone number), 
and it seems to me that what really leverages the power of their systems is 
their interface to the http: world through their <SUBMIT> command ( see 
http://studio.tellme.com/vxml2/ref/elements/submit.html ) .  This empowers 
their developers to reach out and grab data from anywhere in the Internet 
(or optionally WAN) to supplement their responses.  WOW!   THIS IS 
POWERFUL.   I hope A.L.I.C.E. has a way, or will have a way, to accomplish 
the same.

- gr