AI Arrives

As my students reach the end of thier level 4 course in Computing, an inevitable question is "what will we be using next year at level 5". I usually provide some materials on the vle on C#, because that will be the new language and they can pick up the notes etc over the summer to get prepared. This year however I decided it would be interesting to try and make use of AI. The implementation that I settled on was a conversational agent using a Panorabot, I particularly like this idea because for one I can publish the bot to the net and for two I can link it to a virtual bot in Second Life. The image below shows the net version of the bot, by the way little characters name is Tether Gistnut, its an acronym, please feel free to work that one out and follow this link if you would like a chat anyway.

For SecondLife, the experience is somewhat better as I have been able to use conversation responses in such a way that the bot is able to call up and display short video tutorials; you can see one of these running in the background of the screen shot below

If you would like to visit SecondLife and have a chat with Tether then simply follow this link and enjoy. If you would like to know more, then please IM me Skipper Abel in SecondLife, Feedback welcome, bye for now.