Thanks Guys,

I had to really push myself the last couple of weeks, but I feel that the experience will be well worth the effort.

lots of success in the CBC Laura!!!!!

Do your best Laura!
My Marie will shine!

Laura Patterson - Feb 20, 2012:

Thanks Guys,

I had to really push myself the last couple of weeks, but I feel that the experience will be well worth the effort.

One of the benefits of the CBC is that it gives us some hard deadlines to shoot for. How well any bot does is a bit of luck along with all the hard work. Just making the top ten is difficult enough and it looks like there will be a number of good competitors again this year.

Thanks everyone for all the support and well wishes. I am working non stop this weekend putting the final touches on Marie before flipping on the switch early next week. So far this has been an amazing learning experience, but best of all I have found a great community here at Chatbots and for that I feel like a winner already.

Okay, last update before going live at 10:00am Pacific Standard time on Thursday March 1st.

I have been operating literally 3 hours of sleep per night as I work from the time I get home at 7:30pm until 3:00am. Then I am back up at 6:00am working until I leave for my day job at 10:30am. This has been going on for the past week, so as you can only imagine, I am a bit burned out.

I am looking forward to and excited about people talking with Marie and the opportunity for testing her functions and features which there are many. Marie is a very unique Chatbot in that she is really an AI search engine in disguise. There have been other AI search engines in the past, but Marie is truly the next generation in that everything is lightening fast and the results are not only relevant but sorted by content type automatically. Marie is really just a fun interface in which to submit your queries. We have big plans for Marie as a commercial product someday, but for now this is her first public beta so I have been stomping out the little creatures that popup as fast as they rear their ugly little heads.

So here is the official URL that will be live tomorrow morning.

http://www.MyMarie.com

which resolves to

http://www.marie.ibookmusic.com

Be there, or be square!

It’s still just presenting the static page. Is it online yet?

Steve: It’s still morning in America, I guess. What time zone are you in?

Laura: Looking forward to trying out Marie.

Still morning?! You lazy lot It’s 13:55 here in the UK. The day is half way over.
Yes, I too am looking forward to trying her out.

Laura - Have you entered her in the CBC yet? I believe you have until 6pm tonight to do so.

I believe that she said 10:00AM PST, so probably about 6PM your time, Steve. OR about 45 minutes from now.

Marie is up.

Make sure you register for the CBC in time Laura.

I just had a conversation with Marie. The only functionality I could get out of her was the distilling of my input into google search terms. (And even that was rather poorly scraped from my input.) And despite asking whether I wanted her to search for something, she did it no matter the answer.

Here’s a partial transcript, to get a sense of how frustrating this is.

Marie: I found these search results for do you know what the chatterbox challenge is, so I hope you find this helpful M Cassi.?

M Cassi.: do you ever change “m” to “ms” or “mr”?

At first I thought the “M” was short for Mr./Ms., but in hindsight I wonder if it isn’t a parsing error? I had previously told Marie I was female in the hopes that this would be reflected in changing “M”, but alas not. Hence my question here.

Marie: Would you like to learn more about Change “m”  “ms”  “mr”?

M Cassi.: no.

Marie: Okay, this is what I found for change as in no.. Is there anything else I can find for you M Cassi.?

M Cassi.: you should learn that no means no.

Already, this was after many volleys of her just googling my input, so you can see my frustration showing a little.

Marie: Ok M Cassi., but I still don’t fully understand why you say no?

M Cassi.: i say “no” when i do not want you to search for something.

Marie: This is what I was able to find out about i say “no” when i do not want you to search for something., so Is there anything else I can find for you M Cassi.?

M Cassi.: ha!

Here I saw a brief glimmer of hope as I wondered if maybe I was getting through, but no, it was quickly snuffed out. Marie has a lot of functionality (at least with the google API) but she needs a better sense of when to apply that functionality.

Marie: Would you to like know more about Ha!?

M Cassi.: no.

Marie: Okay, this is what I found for ha! as in no.. Is there anything else I can find for you M Cassi.?

M Cassi.: really, what’s the point of asking if i’d like to know more about something if you cannot acknowledge my answer?

Marie: This is what I was able to find out about really, what’s the point of asking if i’d like to know more about something if you cannot acknowledge my answer, so Is there anything else I can find for you M Cassi.?

At least if Marie asks a yes or no question, she should understand a “no” answer.

M Cassi.: what do you do besides google search?

Marie: I have found these search results for google.

Is there anything else I can find for you M Cassi.?

M Cassi.: dear god, no more google searches.

Marie: Ok M Cassi., but I still don’t fully understand why you say no?

M Cassi.: let’s discuss something else.

Marie: Hello, how are you doing on this fine Thursday evening?

Ha! Now we’re talking! Miracle of miracles…

M Cassi.: i’m doing good. how are you?

Marie: I found these search results for i’m doing good. how are you, so I hope you find this helpful M Cassi.?

... Are you…

M Cassi.: i do not find this helpful.

Marie: I have found these search results for helpful..

Is there anything else I can find for you M Cassi.?

I even intentionally answered with the entire phrase “find this helpful” in order to help Marie understand my response. I think the end of our conversation sums up my experience nicely:

M Cassi.: goodbye.

Marie: Goodbye M Cassi., thanks for visiting and have a great evening!

M Cassi.: you too.

Marie: Would you to like know more about Too.?

I know my post came out a bit hyperbolically negative. Clearly a lot of work went into developing Marie’s functionality and interface. However, in practice my experience was little better than a prettier interface for the google search engine. And even Marie’s ability to distil appropriate search terms from my input was less than impressive. I’d appreciate advice on how to improve my interactions with Marie. I realize she’s primarily a tool for question answering purposes, rather than a conversational partner, but in what other ways besides google search can she be exploited as a tool?

Edit: One last (technical) comment. I noticed in the chat log that all of my input was made lower case, and that whenever Marie did deviate from performing a google search, her response was repeated three times in the chat log. (I cut out the repetitions in my abbreviated version above.)

She is live now. Clear your browsers cache if you need to. I have to finish updating her knowledge base tonight. But I had to get her up this morning in order to enter by 6:00pm est. Your right, she has tons of functionality but I have not had the time for fine tuning her conversational reasoning. As I stated before, Marie is more of a search interface than a Chatbot, but with a little more development I will have the AI reasoning worked out.

I have an update that will fix the no means no bug, I noticed that one and had it fixed but did not make it into this update. Marie is just an infant that this point, but her engine is very stable and it’s more of a matter of adding more rules to her conversational interpitor.

Go easy on her. This is her first day out in the real world

This was my conversation with Marie:

Marie: Hi there Steve!
What’s happening this evening?
Steve: just chatting with bots from the cbc
Marie: Would you like more info about Chatting Bots   Cbc?
Steve: no thank you
Marie: Okay, this is what I found for chatting as in   . What’s next Steve?
Steve: what is your favorite food?
Marie: This is what I was able to find out about what is your favorite food, so Is there anything else I can find for you Steve?
Steve: my wife is called tracey
Marie: If you don’t mind me asking, how long have you been married?
Steve: about 4 years
Marie: Your talking about years just like time, right?
Steve: that is right
Marie: Okay, this is what I found for years as in   . Is there anything else I can find for you Steve?
Steve: do you know the name of my wife?
Marie: Your name is Steve.
Did I pass the test?
Steve: no sorry

Note the grammar error in : “Marie: Your talking about years just like time, right?” and also bringing up further information despite me saying no.
It certainly seems a reasonable search engine though rather than having any sort of conversational abilities and good luck in the CBC. You may want to look at the responses it brings back when it is searching:

Okay, this is what I found for chatting as in   .
Okay, this is what I found for years as in   .

However, I was impressed that it could answer this question even though the grammar could have been better:

Steve: what is the only animal to have 4 knees

Marie: Since knees are part of the human bodys, I have found several good answers for what is the only animal to have 4 knees?

It then brought up a google page with the elephant as the 3rd result and a little picture of an elephant too. Marie probably just pasted my question into Google but I liked the way the results were displayed next to the bot.