Bot News
Mabel

By Brian Proffitt

There's something to be said, from the male point of view, for chatting with a nice lady. Maybe that's why Mabel, a chat bot creation of Dr. David Hamill, gets asked out quite so often! Mabel is more than just a pretty face, though, having already made quite an impression for millions of TV viewers on the BBC.

Mabel, along with open source chat bot ALICE, were both featured on the BBC science program "Tomorrow's World" in March, 2000. In the test conducted by the program, three personalities involved were tested online, both in live chats and with transcripts of conversations. Voters were then asked to vote on the realism of conversations held with Mabel, ALICE, and Lesley, who was a human.

The results were interesting, to say the least. Voters gave Mabel high marks for appearing human in the live chats. with Mabel receiving 29% of the vote for being human, ALICE 9.2%, and Lesley 69.7%.

When just looking at the transcripts, voters swung away from Mabel a bit, giving only 23.5% of the vote for being human, with ALICE getting 25.1%, and Lesley 57.2%.

Behind the scenes, Mabel is a sophisticated Web-based chat bot that runs as a CGI script, built with the Perl programming language. Mabel's responses are generated from a database, based on a heirarchical set of heuristic rules for transforming text input into text output.

Hamill is not content to stop creating with just Mabel however. A Senior Lecturer at the School of Electronics, Computing and Mathematics, University of Surrey, Hamill has also started a new company devoted to creating a whole line of chat bots.

This new company, Nevada-based Maybot, is a software company out to build bots seemingly for the sheer fun of it. Maybot plans to release a new chat bot service to any interested clients during the first quarter of 2001, free of charge.

But there is a method to Hamill's madness, as he plans on releasing customized chat bots for commercial Web sites soon after the release of the free chat bot service.

Hamill sees a real potential for chat bots in entertainment, and he has already made this his public goal. Another chat bot creation, Victoria, was featured on a live BBC broadcast of the final Royal Institution Christmas lecture this past December. In this program, Victoria and human nine-year-old Katie were both put to the test of talking to two other children.

Once the test was over, Victoria had sucessfully convinced a fair portion of the audience that it was human. Hamill is convinced that chat bots can provide strong entertainment value to Web sites, and is gearing up Maybot to build software along those lines.

In the meantime, Mabel will happily answer your questions and give her own unique answers.