About

Mrs Program O

Hello Everyone, my name is Elizabeth Perreau and I am the creator of Program O. I work as a developer and live in Nottingham in England.

I fit in the Program O project into any spare time I have, which is not easy with two children and a full time job.

As well as programming, I also LLOOVVEEEEE chicago house music. I hate house work and gardening which is fortunate as I do not get a lot of time for either !

I have always had an interest in computing, robots and AI, I blame a steady diet of sci-fi action films like Terminator, Alien and Short Circuit during my formative years.

I wrote my first AIML chatbot Shakespearebot whilst studying for my BSc Software Engineering. And for my sins I found the whole thing strangley rewarding, when I say ‘strangely’ I mean it took me quite a few months to come to terms with the fact I enjoyed talking to my computer.

Since making ShakespeareBot I have built various other experimental chatbot engines. Mechanical Turkeys which learns and returns taught responses and Botooie which parses search results from Google to form it’s answers.

Though I have gone full circle and feel the best chance I have at creating a human like conversational agent will be using AIML.

One day I hope to go live in Paris and make computer games. The picture I have put up of myself kind if sums it up, whilst lost in Paris I stumbled across the grave of Serge Gainsbourg. It wasnt until I looked at the photo that I saw how distasteful the flower/skull coat was. Thats me, happy, lost and inappropriately dressed!

AIML

AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) is an XML-compliant language writen specifically to create chatbots and was developed by Dr. Richard Wallace.

The language in my opinion has all the neccessary components to create human like conversations between the user and the machine. But in addditon to this it also:

• *Easy to create and extend the existing tagset
• *There is a massive AIML community
• *There are a lot of open source AIML resources to help people create and run their bots.

Knowledge is Power

The strength of any AIML chatbot can be measured by its knowledge base which is main reason I decided to create a PHP/MySQL Chatbot Engine.

ShakespeareBot orginally ran on a modified version of Program E, and in its back end I wrote a library of cronned tasks that would scouer the internet for information about William Shakespeare and convert that data into AIML patterns and templates. But the limitations of Program E meant that I could not get it work correctly. Rather than hack away at the old code, I just decided to rewrite the engine completely from scratch and Program O was born.

Program O

Program O was first released as open source code in Jan 2009, i decided to write it in the most simplest form possible so that it was accessible to as many developers as possible, at all levels of expertise.

The first release of Program O went well, but without an admin area its extendabilty was laboursome. So a few months after v1.0.3 was released with an admin area and plenty of bug fixes!

Now in May 2011 v2 will be released with a few big new features such as mutlibot support and foreign language support.

But the main difference and the thing I am most excited about is the cody tidy.

Having completely scrubbed the code clean and boiled it right down to its most simplest form v2 promises to be easily extenable and collabrative.

I have had so many requests from so many wonderful people to help move Program O onwards and upwards and now at last the project will be in a much better position to do so. The previous release was written by me for me, (it didnt occur to me poeple would want to get involved!). But I am very happy to say that v2 will be a lot easier for us all to work with.

Mods Market Place

I have built an Addons Area into the site, whilst I am still actively promoting the development of free code modifications and snippets, I hope that by offering a market place on the site for people to sell their own addons and mods it will encourage more and more developers out there to get invovled with the Program O project.

Credit where credit is due

I would like to say a huge thanks to the following people who have or do help out out with the core development, testing, documenting and forum moderation.

• GeekCaveCreations

Finally

Thank you for supporting the Program O project. I do not want anyone ever to feel like the do not know enough about programming to get involved with Program O. Why not drop by the forum and say hello, or leave some comments on the site. I would really really love it if you would LIKE the facebook page or follow us on Twitter.

Every word of support no matter how small will be gratefully received and cherished!

Elizabeth x

One Response to “About”

1. popcorn says:

   September 3, 2011 at 8:44 pm

   (I do not want anyone ever to feel like the do not know enough about programming to get involved with Program O) I am the person who do no know about programming but I like your program

   Reply