I’m Done… But Maybe You Aren’t

When I decided to do this whole “Let’s Program A Chatbot” I really only had two goals: Show how to build a very simple chatbot from scratch* and demonstrate the basics of test driven software development. And I feel like I’ve done that. Objective complete, gain 500xp and proceed to the next quest.

But I’m willing to bet that some of my readers aren’t satisfied yet. This humble set of posts was probably enough for those of you where just curious or bored, but what about those of you with very specific chatbot related goals? Goals that you haven’t reached yet. What are you supposed to do now?

That really depends on what exactly your goals are.

If You Want More Practice Writing Software

DELPHI is a good practice project, just complicated enough to require some real thought and development strategies while still being simple enough that you only need a few weekends to get some serious work done. If your main goal is to just get a little bit better at software or practice your Perl and regular expressions then it might make sense to just keep working on improving DELPHI.

Here are some (relatively) simple activities that you might want to try:

Keep Fine Tuning DELPHI: DELPHI is far from perfect and there are lots of ways it could be enhanced or fixed. For example, a lot of my test users asked DELPHI about the weather so it might be interesting to write some high-priority rules that can recognize questions about weather and generate weather themed answers. For further ideas just find a test user, record their conversation and then look for any instance where DELPHI didn’t act as smart as you wanted. Then write up some test cases and see if you can’t get DELPHI acting a little smarter.

Turn DELPHI Into ELIZA: ELIZA is a famous chatbot that pretends to be a psychiatrist by turning user input into questions. With a little research I’m sure you could find a copy or summary of the basic patterns and responses it used to do that. Now erase all of DELPHI’s old chat patterns and create a brand new set based off of ELIZA. Creating new regex patterns to match ELIZA’s strategy will be great practice.

Create A Whole New Set Of Rules And Responses: Instead of replacing DELPHI’s rules with ELIZA’s rules, why not try creating your own brand new set of rules and building a completely unique chatbot? Like baseball? Create a new set of rules oriented around explaining the game and sharing trivia about famous players. Are you a history buff? Create rules for answering questions about your favorite historic event or person. This will give you great practice at designing chatbots, writing test cases and coding up regular expressions.

Of course, if all you ever do is write and replace chat rules you’ll always be limited by the innate weaknesses of simple pattern matching. For a better chatbot and some more serious coding practice why not try tackling one of these projects:

Give DELPHI A Memory: Wouldn’t it be nice if DELPHI could ask the user for their name and then remember it? Or if DELPHI could remember that the user’s last question was about their dog and then use that information to create a personalized error message the next time it get’s confused? (I’M NOT SURE WHAT TO SAY TO THAT. TRY ASKING ME ANOTHER QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR DOG). To pull this off you’d have to create a new data structure to hold DELPHI’s memories and rewrite the response generation system to figure out what information it should store and when it should retrieve it. Tricky, but satisfying.

Connect Input To Function Calls: Currently DELPHI does the exact same thing for all input patterns: It grabs an output pattern from an array and prints it to the screen. But what if we need more flexibility? Maybe when the user asks “What time is it?” we want to run a special sub-function that figures out what time it is and builds a response around that? Or maybe we want DELPHI to be able to answer “What is X?” questions by searching Wikipedia?

If you want DELPHI to do something different for each type of input you’ll need to find some way to associate input patterns with function calls instead of with simple output arrays. In Perl you can do this with function references. Exactly how would you do this? That’s for you to figure out. This is an advanced exercise after all.

Port DELPHI To A New Language: DELPHI uses regular expressions to match user input to chatbot output. Most modern languages support regular expressions or have easy-to-find regular expressions libraries. So why not recreate DELPHI in C++ or Java or Lisp or Python or Ruby or whatever it is all the cool kids are doing these day. Depending on what language you choose and how unlike Perl it is you may have to redesign major features like how the chat patterns are stored, but that’s what makes this a good advanced exercise.

If You Want To Make Serious Chatbots

What if you aren’t here to practice your software skills? What if you’re here because you really want to build a fully featured chatbot as soon as possible? In that case messing around with a toy like DELPHI is probably a waste of your time. It would make much more sense to use an existing tool that already has all the features you wat.

Now I’ve never had to deploy a professional quality chatbot, but from what I’ve seen ALICE is probably the way to go. ALICE uses the AIML standard to allow for very powerful pattern matching style chatbots. It also seems to already have support for advanced features like context and memory, which would be a challenge to shove into DELPHI.

Even better, there are tons of existing AIML libraries that can be downloaded to make your chatbot an instant expert on a wide variety of subjects. So not only do you not have to write your bot from scratch, you don’t have to write your responses from scratch either. Just grab a library and then tweak it for your specific needs.

So if you need to build a strong chatbot fast I’d recommend learning about AIML and downloading ALICE.

If You Want To Write Programs That Really Understand Language

By this point in the series you’ve probably realized that DELPHI (and most other chatbots) doesn’t actually understand English or how grammar works. DELPHI just looks at input, compares it to a list or patterns and then spits out a response. It’s a glorified “if… then…” statement.

On the one hand it’s pretty cool that such simple tricks can create an almost human-feeling program. On the other hand it’s pretty disappointing that DELPHI is only a trick. That’s like learning that the magicians at Vegas are just using slight of hand. You wanted real magic. You wanted a program that really understands human language.

Lucky for you there is a lot of research going into teaching human language to computers. Just go to your nearest university level library or favorite search engine and do some research on “Natural Language Processing”. This is an extremely large area of research that includes topics like: Labeling words as their part of speech, statistically analyzing books, automatic language translation, parsing sentences, building sentences and using context to deal with ambiguity. Not to mention the endless philosophical debates on what it even means for a computer to “understand” or “know” something.

But be warned that this sort of stuff gets complicated fast. Dive into this topic and you’re very quickly going to find yourself learning more about linguistics, grammar, statistics and logic than you may have ever wanted. It’s a fun ride but don’t go into it thinking you can read a book or two and then slap together an AI that passes the Turing Test with flying colors. This is hard, serious research at the cutting edge of computer science.

But if you manage to push that cutting edge further, even by a little…

Conclusion

DELPHI is done and I hope all my wonderful readers have enjoyed themselves. I’ve done my best to show you a few fun tricks and point the insatiably curious towards more ambitious projects and sources of knowledge. All that’s really left now is clean up work. I should probably make an index page that links all these individual posts together. Probably ought to post my complete code as well.

*As a young college student I had the hardest time finding any books or tutorials on chatbots. That was really frustrating and this whole series has basically just been me writing the sort of article I wish I could have read five years ago.

You Need Me To Do What?!

Let’s say that you’re a programmer with no real talent for or interest in web design. But the startup you work at really needs someone to redesign their product to be more mobile friendly and they don’t have time to hunt for and hire a real designer. What is a programmer to do?

For me the answer was “Buy a book”. Ideally something simple enough that you don’t need to be an expert designer, deep enough to give you a real understanding of the field and short enough that you can finish the material and get back to work fast.

Implementing Responsive Design by Tim Kadlec turned out to be just about perfect.

Programmer Friendly

Implementing Responsive Design seems to have been directed more towards designers than developers but is overall easy to follow as long as you know the technical basics of HTML and CSS (and as a web programmer you probably do). There is no tricky vocabulary and you aren’t expected to be a graphical wizard who Photoshops in their sleep. There is nothing in the book that requires any existing experience with design or any special software and as a programmer in a hurry I really appreciated that.

Even better, the book has half a dozen practical examples complete with screen shots and sample code showing how different techniques lead to different looks on both desktop and mobile. The book also does a good job of covering the theory behind responsive mobile-first design which really helped me get into the head of how designers think. Learning how to properly think about mobile design is much more useful than just memorizing a few CSS rules.

Covers A Lot Of Territory Very Quickly

The book weighs in at a slim 250 pages making it the sort of thing you can read in one or two evenings. It starts with the absolute basics of “What is responsive design?” (creating web pages that change their layout depending on screen size) and then spends a few chapters tackling both the basic tools of reactive design and the thought process behind deciding how to design a reactive page in the first place.

After that is taken care of the book spends a little time exploring some more advanced techniques for optimizing loading times and enhancing the user experience for specific platforms. It then briefly covers some promising responsive technologies being developed, muses a bit about the future of web design and before you know it the book is done, having covered a lot of valuable information in a very short amount of time. Once again this is a very good thing for people like me who need to learn a lot of new things very quickly.

A Starting Point, Not A Reference Book

The one thing you should be aware of is that Implementing Responsive Design doesn’t have all the answers. And some of the answers it does have will probably be obsolete by the time you buy the book. Web technology is changing fast!

But you don’t really need all the answers. As long as you know what questions to ask you can find pretty much anything on the Internet. What this book is for is teaching you enough about responsive design to figure out what questions to ask in the first place. It helps you understand fundamental theories and techniques and any programmer worth his salt should be able to use that as a springboard to start researching specific solutions to their own specific problem.

Final Thoughts: A Good Buy For People Who Don’t Know Anything And Want To Fix That

Before this book all I knew about mobile design was that you could theoretically get a page to render differently based on whether it was on a phone or on a computer. 250 pages later I have a big grab-bag of common techniques for making this happen and, more importantly, I feel like I understand the motivation behind responsive web design. It changed how I look at putting content together and in an age of smartphones and tablets I think that developing an expanded and more flexible idea of what layout means is an invaluable skill.

On the other hand, if you’re already have some experience with designing pages that work well on both mobile and desktop you probably won’t find too much in this book you don’t already know.

But as a programmer I thought Implementing Responsive Design was a worthwhile read, even if I never have to program a mobile website by hand again. After all, the better we programmers understand how the user hopes to browse our websites and how the designers hope to style them the better job we can do of making sure our code and data supports a future full of diverse devices.

One of the best things about computer programming is that as soon as you learn a new skill you can start practicing it. All you need is a computer and a spare weekend or two.

Plumbing, on the other hand, requires an actual problem to solve. You can’t practice fixing pipes if there aren’t any broken pipes to fix. To a wannabe handyman a house full of functional appliances is actually almost frustrating.

Which explains why I was bizarrely happy to hear the telltale dripping of a leaky faucet. Finally, a chance to develop some practical maintenance skills! And overall it went pretty well considering that the leak is gone and I still have all my fingers.

Now I’m back to waiting, patiently hoping for a new fixture to spring a leak so I can pull out my wrenches and reference manuals and come one project closer to mastering the challenges of maintaining a modern home.