Thursday, October 26, 2006

A.I. Chatbots

I just signed a short contract with Terasem Movement to create an A.I. chatbot web application. The goal is to enable users to create chatbots representing themselves by uploading customized Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) files. I have already had some success installing and testing Program D, an Open Source Java A.L.I.C.E. interpreter.

If I have time, I hope to add speech synthesis for output. At my previous job, we were able to combine an Open Source Java text-to-speech (TTS) engine FreeTTS with the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML). This was a favorite feature of my children as they delighted in typing in text to make the computer say whatever they wanted. This promises to be a fun project.

It is wonderful to be able to combine all of these Open Source components to create a new application. Fortunately I will be able to contribute this effort to the Open Source community as well. Look for the source code to start appearing in the CroftSoft Code Library in the days ahead.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Savor Screensaver

I wrote my first screensaver, CroftSoft Savor, using the early access SaverBeans Screensaver SDK version 0.2. So far I have only deployed it on Windows but since the SaverBeans SDK is Java-based it should be cross-platform. After you have a chance to download and install it, take a peek at the source code.