I should note here that replies are in all caps solely to remain consistent with the interface in the Alien movie and not due to any requirement of SuperScript. Now that we have our basic telnet interface set, let's start by building a simple command-and-response type interaction. For the most part I've used the default script, with one exception we'll get into later, but it is important to note that you can customize how the telnet server functions. This is set within script that runs the telnet server. The welcome message is obviously customizable "interface " is straight out of the Alien movie after all and not a SuperScript default. Before we can do that though, we need to make sure Mongo is running. Once you have, you'll need to run through the parsing of the text, building the project and starting the telnet client.
If you want to follow along with the code, feel free to clone the repo. However, SuperScript does support other clients, including Slack.
This will create a default project and install the necessary dependencies. I won't regurgitate the nicely done SuperScript installation guide here other than to reiterate that you will need both Node. As a side note, there is apparently some sort of MUTHUR bot that was created as part of some promotional material for the upcoming movie, although it does not respond to some of the basic queries from the original film when I tried it. Let's take a deeper look at some of the features and how SuperScript makes them possible. Keep in mind that the bot I created is still a work in progress - there were a lot of interactions I had planned that I simply haven't been able to complete yet and improvements to existing interactions that I'd like to see. So, much of the chat bot I ended up creating is more "inspired by" rather than direct recreation of the movie. Admittedly, there is limited direct interaction with MUTHUR in the movie most occurring in the scene abovebut there is quite a bit of implied interaction. One of the interesting things about MUTHUR compared to other computer AI in science fiction movies is that every interaction with her on screen is done via text.įor instance, she knows that the "enhancement request" is related to the question about special order and so on. Of course, AI has been the subject of endless science fiction, which is where I took the inspiration for my demo project. It was something that personally fascinated me and, in this article, I hope to introduce you to how SuperScript works by discussing a sample project I created with it.Ī conversational bot is arguably a simplistic form of artificial intelligence in that it mimics a human behavior while appearing to understand both language and context within a conversation. SuperScript is an engine for creating bots using JavaScript and Node. This is where a tool like SuperScript comes into play. In some cases, you may even want your bot to understand the nature of a conversation, so that every input isn't looked at in a silo, completely disconnected with what has previously been communicated.
This is complicated by the fact that there are a hundred ways to say any one thing. You have to be able to receive text or in some cases, convert voice commands to textparse it and match it to a response. That's right - who needs words even! However, creating bots isn't necessarily easy.
This desire to text rather than talk has led to the increasing utility of bots to the degree that banks can now understand emoji.
Even things like one-on-one customer support seem to be increasingly chat rather than call. Today, we might talk to our machines Siri, Alexa, etc. Let's admit it - speaking to other people is so last century.