This is the development branch for Program B (Bixsby). This is still a work in progress.

AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) is an XML-compliant language used for building simple AI. It contains everything needed create a chat bot. It matches responses to inputs, stores values, and follows topics.

Here is an example of AIML:

<aiml>
  <category>
    <pattern>WHAT ARE YOU</pattern>
      <template>
        <think><set name="topic">Me</set></think> 
        I am the latest result in artificial intelligence,
        which can reproduce the capabilities of the human brain
        with greater speed and accuracy.
      </template>
  </category>
</aiml>

<pattern>   Contains a pattern that can be matched to a user's input.
<template>  Contains a response for the matched input.

You'll also see in the above example a <think> and a <set> node. If the user had asked "What are you?", the interpreter matches the pattern, then looks into the <template> node for the response. It would then process the <think> node, which tells the interpreter to silently process the <set> node. In this case, we are setting the current topic value to "Me". Then the interpreter finally outputs the text to the user. AIML contains a hearty list of useful nodes which are all supported by ProgramB. See the full list here: http://ai.wikia.com/wiki/AIML

1. Ruby 2+
2. Nokogiri

$ sudo apt-get install libxslt-dev libxml2-dev

$ gem install nokogiri

-or-

$ bundle install

ProgramB comes with a CLI tool for testing:

$ ruby bin/programb

ProgramB is easy to add to any Ruby application. It's not quite published as a Gem, but you can install ProgramB by either cloning the source, or add it to your Gemfile:

gem 'programb', :git => 'https://github.com/pacothelovetaco/programb.git'

Here is a simple example of how to implement a chat program with ProgramB

bixsby = Programb::Kernel.new
# Load in your AIML director
bixsby.learn("aiml/alice")

# Start the loop
while true
  print "/User #{Time.now.strftime('%H:%M:%S')}> "
  # Get user input
  input = gets.chomp.to_s
  # Get a response from ProgramB
  response = bixsby.respond(input)
  puts "/programB #{Time.now.strftime('%H:%M:%S')}> #{response}"
end