Howie

Howie is a artificial intelligence agent with a natural language interface. Howie is designed to be simple to install, configure and above all extend.

Howie is a conversational AI -- a computer program you can talk to. He is designed to be simple to install, configure and (above all) extend.

Currently, Howie is willing to discuss sports, religion, sex (reluctantly) and philosophy. He even knows a little German!

Howie is able to answer most questions of the form "Who/what/where/when is/was/are/were X?" -- though his answers are occasionally more entertaining than accurate. He can also help find rhymes for a word, or tell you what an acronym means.

He will someday provide definitions or synonyms for any word in the dictionary, query your address book, and even perform a few simple remote system-administration tasks!

You can communicate with Howie in a number of different ways: AIM, MSN Messenger, Jabber Chat, XML-RPC, or locally on the command-line. Future versions will include interfaces for HTTP, IRC, ICQ, Zephyr, and more!

Howie's knowledge base is made up of a wide variety of Internet resources. If you find something that he can't do, it's usually pretty straightforward to teach him!

Requirements:

￭ Python 2.2.2 or greater ￭ 64 MB available RAM (more or less, depending on the AIML set you're using) ￭ Dedicated Internet connection