Last Question: What is a chatterbot all in all useful for?
There are at present a lot of commercial chatterbots around the web to help customers for instance at web-shops and e-commerce sites. Other chatterbots are working like an interactive (talking) encyclopedia. You can find a lot of chatterbots administrating IRC-channels and Hotline server. Talking virtual characters are heavily used in MUD environments (Multi User Dungeon – a classic form of role playing games on the computer), and chatterbots are one step to talking computers and talking machines at all. In the next future we sure will have talking personal agents included in our hand phone, which will have the function of a notebook, diary, address book, daily organizer, shopping cart etc.pp and will be commanded by speech only. And this is only the first step. You remember the Star Trek movie, where the Enterprise is moving back into the past to rescue the whales, and Scotty in one scene is grabbing a computer mouse like a microfone and says “Hello Computer?” but got no respond? Okay
