[DaveMorton]

Dr. Richard Wallace, creator of the ALICE chatbot and co-creator of the AIML standard, announced today the public release of the new, expanded AIML 2.0 standard. It's still in the "working draft" stage, but this new standard will provide some very exciting new features, including the ability of one chatbot to access information from other chatbots, centrally supplied chatbot servers, or other web/network services. The list of features added is rather long, and some of them may require a bit of explanation/discussion. I encourage any and all botmasters to participate in the upcoming discussion, to get better acquainted with what's coming down the line.

Ok, what does this mean for us today? Not much (well, a ~LOT~ for me, since I have to... well, that's my problem, isn't it? ), but it could mean a great deal by the end of the year or sooner. I'm really looking forward to incorporating the new AIML standard into Program O version 3, but it may take me a while to get a suitable set of modules written to accommodate the new standard. Thankfully, the design of version 3 will be such that adding the modules (once they're written) will be a simple, painless thing.

I know several of us have chatbots that will probably be built using the new standard, so it would behoove us all to join in on the discussion at chatbots.org. The site's performance is much improved now, so that shouldn't be an issue any more.