Well, folks, it’s been over 2 years now since the first request for Program O to support international (Unicode) characters was submitted, and on behalf of the entire development team for the project, I’d like to announce that we’ve finally done it! Introducing Program O, version 2.2, with full and complete support for UTF-8 and Unicode character sets! We’ve fully tested the script with the following languages:
[ul]
[li]Arabic[/li]
[li]Chinese(traditional)[/li]
[li]Dutch[/li]
[li]English(just in case, you see)[/li]
[li]French[/li]
[li]German[/li]
[li]Greek[/li]
[li]Portuguese[/li]
[li]Russian[/li]
[li]Spanish[/li]
[li]Thai[/li]
[li]Turkish[/li]
[/ul]
all without even a tiny hiccup.
Now botmasters can create AIML files in their chosen language, without having to “fall back” on English, enabling their chatbots to enter new markets, and other realms where they weren’t able to communicate before. Liz Perreau is working on a “machine translation” version of the ALICE AIML set in Turkish, and I’ll be working with other individuals on a Portuguese version, as well. Please feel free to check out http://www.program-o.com for more details.