 how is this any different from attaching an infobot or a l i c e through licq s console hook people have been doing that for years and for over a decade in irc and the muds and the one thing i think we ve learned in all that time is that as a help desk it doesn t work people just don t like talking to robots especially when the robots once confused become imbeciles i think the humans may feel cheated deceived and tricked when they discover as with the seattle answer that they are talking to a machine there s no real intelligence behind that simulated friendly and therefore empty thx aiml is clever and cute but for practical applications as a first line of technical support it s been tried over and over and while i also think that it should work for the most part people won t use it what s worse as we make the nl processing more and more clever it only means it fails more dramatically alice doesn t just stumble a bit it starts to drool and alice is the best we have like a dalek all very impressive when things are going well but all it takes to betray the chicken brain inside is a towel over it s ill placed eye or a spin off the metal surface in all the prolog based nl database query systems of the NUMBER s and other later chatterbot helpdesk projects like shallow red even simpler tries like ask jeeves people very quickly know they re talking to a robot and the queries anneal to short truncated and terse database like verb noun or just noun keyword requests people are just too quick to adapt and too impatient to forgive a clunky interface and for now especially when the average computer user still can t type more than maybe NUMBER NUMBERwpm nl is a painfully slow clunky interface put it this way would you login wake the bot and ask for the seattle weather or would you do as we all do and just click the weather icon sitting there on your desktop just for fun here s an interesting conversation between shallow red alice and eliza as they decide to play the turing game URL gary lawrence murphy garym URL teledynamics communications blog URL biz URL computers are useless they can only give you answers picasso 