Bot News
AdviceDummy

By Brian Proffitt

AdviceDummy is one of those chat bots that's a nice idea in the planning stages, but the execution leads something to be desired.

Here's the plan: take a Shockwave-animated interface with a wise-looking columnist-type dispensing Web search results based on natural-language questions the user poses. The results, by the way, are neat little editorial packages that do more than just list the URLs.

Sounds good, right?

Okay, here's the execution: unless the questions posed exactly match what the AdviceDummy expects, very little information can be gleaned.

For example: one of the example questions used is this: "I need a medical expert." So, I tried something similar: "I need a horoscope." This seemed a good bet, because "horoscope" was one of the site categories located below the AdviceDummy interface.

The answer was this: "I'm sorry. I can't understand you. Please use grammatical sentences."

Now, I am fairly modest, but I would like to think that after ten years of professional writing, I would have picked up some degree of skill in grammar. So you can see why this answer threw me a bit.

Once more into the breech, then: "I would like to see my horoscope."

The reply: "I'm sorry. I can't understand you. Please use grammatical sentences."

I decided to try one of the sample questions, just so I could see something: "I'm looking for a medical expert." actually produced something akin to an answer. The list of sites was not terribly comprehensive, but all the same it seemed adequate.

But the problem continued for other searches. I tried seven more topics, with various phrasings, and the only answer I got was: "I'm sorry..."

Clearly for this site to work, the parser for the search questions has got to be improved, especially when my questions were aiming for topics I knew the site covered.

AdviceDummy is more than just a somewhat-limited interface. There are 32 categories available to click on the site's "Big Kahuna" list, each with a fair amount of sites to visit. This is not by any means a comprehensive site, unfortunately.

AdviceDummy has some fairly hefty technical requirements, too. Flash 8 is needed for the Shockwave display, which is still new enough that many browsers will need this updated version. My Internet Explorer also needed an animated GIF display upgrade, too. The site can also talk using the SpeakforItself plug-in, which you need to download as well.

All of this takes some time, and the end result is not terribly clear. Very little animation is seen on the screen, when all is said and done.

If AdviceDummy can expand its base of listings, and clear up the issues with the natural language parser it seems to have, then this tool will be a smart little interface for those who are not in the mind to go Googling. But sadly, this promise is not here yet.