Ask Alice

A.L.I.C.E. is an artificial linguistics entity (at least that what she likes to say about herself) created by Dr. Richard Wallace in 1991 and activated in 1995. In fact, her birthday is coming up (November 23rd). Alice uses AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), an XML-compliant language. Alice has 25,000 categories from which responses are called, which means you can have a pretty interesting conversation with her. There's an AIML primer that gives a very nice overview of what can be done.

I've known about A.L.I.C.E. for a few years now but she came to mind when looking over some of the games we're creating. I realize that this may be too advanced or just another headache, but maybe not. For example the project management group (my group) and the history group may be able to use her, or someone like her. Someone to give some kind of advice or some help for when someone is really lost. Perhaps players could access their helpbot X number of times, or they loose points, etc.

Try out a conversation with her, she has very interesting taste in music.