The discussion revolves around creating interactive bot users within Discourse. will_io proposes a concept of AI-powered users that can initiate topics and respond to notifications with data from third-party sources, similar to Siri.
will_io compares this idea to onebox functionality and suggests using a tool like Nokogiri.
Others share similar ideas, with SidV comparing it to “trivia bots” on IRC networks, and erlend_sh providing resources for bot development, such as Botkit.ai and Botframework.
merefield shares their experience integrating Cleverbot into a client’s project, allowing users to converse with the bot. They also suggest exploring interactive fiction within Discourse, which could be adapted to utilize posts instead of topics, but might be resource-intensive.
I am just playing with some ideas. Wondering if anyone has something in place that conditionally operates with the api and the discourse db or a third party database?
This has got something with nokogiri written all over it almost like the onebox if it does third party “fetching”.
Artificial intelligence users would be users that can both start new topics (i.e. this day in history for my liberal category, today’s birthdays) and also respond to “@ai_user” notifications with some sort of arbitrary third party data lookup that pertains to your specific community.
example post with response:
“@ai_user Tell me who is Donald Trump?”
@ai_user would then respond with hard data on Donald Trump and maybe a picture to keep the discussion going.
It would be like an online “Siri” but with more specific functionality.
I recently worked with a client to hook in https://www.cleverbot.com/ so that the bot would reply to you if you @ mentioned it. You could have a conversation with it. Unfortunately that project was closed-sourced or I would share, but the concept is straightforward. It is also fairly light-weight as an extension because all the ‘AI’ is performed remotely and you are leveraging the bots existing capabilities.
On a related note you can embed Interactive Fiction in a Topic like so:
You could do the same, but use Posts for each step in your journey, but I think that would be hugely wasteful of forum resources and who’s going to read that again unless they are looking for a walkthrough? (now that’s an idea!)
