Resurrecting My Failed Bot

More than 15 years ago, I attempted to make a chatbot using mIRC scripts. I named it Thunderbot and it was, for lack of a better word, pathetic. It was rudimentary and could only reply to very basic phrases. At that time, I didn’t know anything about natural language processing.

But then I chanced upon an article talking about how Sarah Nyberg built a bot to argue with internet trolls and it reminded me of my old goal of building a bot again. With new javascript libraries like Tracery and NLP Compromise popping up that would make linguistic computation easier, that goal seems a lot more within reach.

It also prompted me to publish my private notes on Natural Language Processing and Voice Recognition. I’ve been compiling these resources for month in Evernote but thought that it might be useful to other people so I’ve posted them online.