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ALICE BOT: This chatbot for natural language is provided by the A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) foundation. The development of ALICE has been inspired by ELIZA, a program developed by Joseph Weizenbaum in the 60s. It is one of the most advanced chatbots and has won three times the Loebner-Price (2000, 2001 and 2004). In contrast to the original Eliza program, Alice uses extensive formalized knowledge and can learn during the conversation. The original version of the program has been developed by Dr. Richard Wallace. In addition, there is an active community of developers advancing Alice in the context of the open source project www.alicebot.org.

SPEECH OUTPUT: There are several opportunities to turn text into spoken langugage. Researchers from the DFKI have developed an advanced speech synthesis capable of reflecting emotions. See the MARY Text-to-Speech System mary.dfki.de for further information or directly explore the features of the system using the Mary Web Client. If you want to contribute to the project, please visit the website of OpenMary at mary.opendfki.de. Another project is speech.js which allows to generate speech output with pure cllient-side javascript.

YOUR PRIVACY: Please note that the chatbot is hosted by Pandorabots and consequently your input is transferred to their servers. On the server, a chat protocol is stored for each session. As of now, I have not found a way to disable this logging (it is meant to improve the chatbots). Therefore, make sure that you do not enter confidential details about you, your family and friends or other privacy-related information.

System requirements: This website supports and has been tested on Firefox 8 and Google Chrome 11. Apple Quicktime should be installed for audio output. Known issues: There are problems with Google text-to-speech and the audio output in browsers. In Chrome, the input field loses its focus when the audio has been played.