[alicebot-archcomm] Coming up to speed.

[Ernest Lergon]

Hi Gary,

welcome from me too - maybe you're the missing link ;-)

To speed you up, some links of interest:

*Summary*

http://list.alicebot.org/pipermail/alicebot-archcomm/2003-March/000808.html

*Speech*

(maybe you know that all):
http://list.alicebot.org/pipermail/alicebot-general/2002-October/006914.html
http://list.alicebot.org/pipermail/alicebot-general/2003-June/008212.html

*System Interfaces*

SQL frontend:
http://list.alicebot.org/pipermail/alicebot-general/2003-March/007719.html

WordNet frontend:
http://list.alicebot.org/pipermail/alicebot-general/2003-July/008271.html

*Exchanging knowledge*

Trusted source:
http://list.alicebot.org/pipermail/alicebot-general/2002-June/004805.html

*Some remarks*

In ProgramV <system> is deprecated in favor of <perl>, which provides a
safer interface to OS routines.

Fetching information from the web:

It depends, how the data is structured. IMHO it makes no sense getting a
complete HTML-page and displaying it inside the GUI of an web-based
ALICE. Another thing is XML-formatted data - from search engines or
newsfeeder i.e. - which can be easily accessed by external modules:

<aiml>
<perl>
use SOAP::Lite
    service => 'http://www.xmethods.net/sd/StockQuoteService.wsdl';

sub getQuote
{
    my $quote = shift;

    return SOAP::Lite::getQuote ( $quote );
}
</perl>

<category>
    <pattern>WHAT IS THE CURRENT QUOTE OF *</pattern>
    <template>
       <star/>
       <perl>getQuote ( '<star/>' )</perl> US-$
       at <date/>
    </template>
</category>
</aiml>

will yield:

user>  What is the current quote of IBM?
alice> IBM 82.47 US-$ at 2003-07-28 19:14

In conjunction with Apache mod_perl the performance is very high: The
Perl script at top-level <perl> is compiled at server startup.

There is another mighty module family - LWP - which provides simple
access to any source on the net - from

    use LWP::Simple;
    $doc = get 'http://www.linpro.no/lwp/';

up to a full blown simulation of a webbrowser - even with encrpytion and
authentication.

So I think there is no need for special tags in AIML handling HTTP.


Speech interface:

The TTS part should be no problem, because Alice puts out plain text,
which can be enriched by VoiceXML tags.

The input might be more interesting: Taking only the plain text
delivered from a STT engine will work with AIML's pattern matching - but
aren't we processing the input two-fold?

AFAIK a STT engine delivers some meta-information about the input,
depending on the grammar used. Could we use this to improve our matching?

Or is it just the other way round: Could we export AIML patterns to
train a STT engine?

Questions over questions...

Ernest

-- 
               ProgramV - Alice on Perl - available at
                http://www.virtualitas.net/perl/aiml/

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