Verbose, sassy, and surprisingly spry, Mr. Bones is an animesh skeleton on the Marketplace here from The Really Useful Scripts Corner (a proud sponsoring partner to this blog) powered by the Corner’s unique chatbot system. (Click here to chat with Mr. Bones in SL -- touch the pumpkin to rezz him.)
As you can see from the video above and my dialog below, Mr. Bones himself makes for a friendly virtual companion in SL (he can even follow you on command!), but he’s also meant to show off Really Useful Script Corner’s feature set for customizable NPCs (Non-Player Characters).
“My basic chatbot has two functions - Chat and Responses,” lead developer Grace7 Ling explains, “Chat includes the bot being able to greet visitors and greet its owner. The bot can also remember who it has met before as well.” Her chatbot can also spout random things as a way of encouraging nearby SLers to reply.
As for responses, Grace means more than simple text-based replies. Responses include “doing something in response to a keyword or key phrase it hears, like giving a landmark or SLurl, or playing a sound or animation.”
Ms. Ling’s more advanced chatbot comes with a third feature: Chatter, which enables owners to specify multiple possible answers to a statement, with different probabilities for each. You can even expand your bot’s phrase recognition range by adding “brain-files” (i.e. notecards) to its database.
While Mr. Bones comes with the new Animesh Pro Edition chatbot script, Grace’s chatbot series includes a mesh human, a French bulldog, a parrot, and a mirror.
Her customers, she tells me, are already using them for a wide variety of NPCs in their own projects:
“Some popular uses of chatbot are bartender, receptionist, or a NPC to greet visitors in a roleplay sim,” Grace tells me. “One customer used it as a ‘nanny for prim babies’”. On Grace’s own sim, she’s programmed a chatbot to act like a supermarket manager -- click here to visit that bot. (The animesh skeleton itself, by the way, is made by Grace’s friend Bad Katz.)
Interestingly, upgrading her chatbots to support animesh introduced a complex design challenge:
“Making Mr. Bones ‘walk’ smoothly while following the owner, and stopping when the owner stops was not as easy as it sounds. As animesh is still relatively new, and detecting whether an animation is playing or not is actually not possible with LSL, I've experienced several glitches and limitations.”
The chatbot’s SmartAttention feature was created to make the bot more life-like and really useful:
“[T]he bot will assume it is not being spoken to, unless the speaker is facing it and within 10 meters. This is a relatively unique feature I think.” Given the fact that many actual Second Life users often decline to chat or even face other nearby players, I’d say that’s quite unique indeed.
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