[Freddy]

We used to do this a long time back with UltraHal and ALICE - getting the bots talk to each other. I always found it interesting.

Let's talk about love...



Say that again...



Alexa versus Google Home...

[WriterOfMinds]

The first one was my favorite.  "You have more than one mind?"

[Freddy]

Yes I liked that too. I'm half tempted to buy an Alexa.

When we did this with Hal and Alice; Hal would learn all of Alice's lines, so in a sense you could use Alice to program Hal just by having them talk to each other.

I don't know if Alexa learns anything. I imagine they have botmasters scripting things and scanning logs etc. Nice to have that user base to help develop the bot if that's the case.

[Don Patrick]

As far as I know, Alexa's chat functions are the sole result of the Alexa Prize, in which various teams of students made chatbots and got a clean half a million for it. Many of them had their bot automatically learn sentence pairs (e.g. question + answer) for contents, but I don't believe they continue to learn from users (There would surely be outrage over privacy issues). The first video appears to run two copies of Eliza.
The rest of Alexa's skills are largely third-parties manually setting up keywords and conversation trees for specific services.
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-amazon-alexa-prize/

I like the infinite loop in a very juvenile kind of way. I also think it's clever that someone appears to have set up "Heygoogle" as their username for Alexa.