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Waseem Bashir
MSc. Software Engineering
School of Computer Science
University of Manchester

Dr. John McNaught              
School of Computer Science
Deputy Director
National Centre for Text Mining
Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre
University of Manchester



Human-machine interaction has always been fascinating from the early days. Since lot of work has been done to improve the level of conversation there is more that can be done. The fundamental aim of a chatterbot is to fool the user that they are speaking to a human. While some have been able to replicate while others have failed. Most chatterbots are limited in their knowledge because of the fact their brain is hand coded, so their intelligence depend upon their masters who decide what to store in them. The power of internet can be utilized to make chatterbots more intelligent. This report discusses on how internet can be used to improve the quality of conversation. We propose to make the chatterbot dynamic which accesses information from the internet and also relies on some pre-hand coded information. The result is an efficient and a clever chatterbot.


What is ManBot?



ManBot is a .net library. It has been programmed over AIMLBot. AIMLBot uses ManBot's .net library and adds extra features which offer an unique chatting experience.
Most of the chatterbots developed are hand coded i.e. their bot brains are static and are regulary fed by their botmasters. ManBot is an innovative way which helps botmasters and provides up-to date information. ManBot uses the World Wide Web as a source of information and provides dynamic information on topics such as weather, definition, thesaurus, news, etc.
ManBot can be fine tuned to meet specific demands or requirements. We have programmed ManBot to generate replies for prospective Manchester University students. ManBot and AIMLBot both generate replies from their respective brains, i.e. the static brain and the dynamic one.

What's New?


Current Version 1.0.0
Supports weather feeds from a dedicated web service.
Now includes definition service, which can be invoked by (define term).

Last updated on 27th August 2008.