What is the difference between a Chat Bot and Brainhat?

A Chat Bot is a program that runs hand-crafted dialogs and produces hand-crafted responses. Pattern-matching and recursion pull the user through conversational branches. Chat-bots can mimic a conversation, they can keep state, they are very efficient, and there is a great amount of chat already written. People like to think that they're artificial intelligence.

Brainhat is a first-principals Natural Language Processing system. It understands input and generates output from a deep semantic level. Brainhat has inferencing capability, allowing it to ponder the implications of new knowledge and anticipate what the user might say next.

They're compatible!

The two approaches are compatible, and can be combined to create a better dialog product:

• A chat bot's efficiency and breadth of content make it an amiable interface for entertainment or self-help.
• Brainhat's goal-oriented behavior can give a conversation momentum, or elicit specific information.

Our latest versions of Brainhat code can make a back-end connection to a Pandorabots AIML bot server, including Alicebot by Dr. Richard Wallace. When Brainhat runs in conjunction with a Pandorabots AIML bot, it will share everything it hears with the bot. Responses from the bot and Brainhat will be combined.

We've also updated our SAPI speech interface to make it possible to talk directly to Pandorabots' servers, in addition to a Brainhat server.

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