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Public domain photo of Dr. Sigmund Freud
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The doctor is in!
This is the web page for AppEliza, a simple ELIZA style chat-bot I created in only one day with AppInventor, except for the Twitter support that I added this morning. Here's a link to the package file (APK):
http://www.AndroidReview.com/appeliza.apk
Your phone will need the free Eyes-Free Text To Speech package,available on the Android Marketplace.
For help with AppEliza or to chat with other users about it visit the AppEliza Facebook Group page:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=131936720175889
Sample Sessions on Twitter:
Live AppEliza Twitter “sessions”
WHAT IT DOES:
You simply talk to AppEliza and it responds, like a typical therapist would. AppEliza uses Google’s speech recognition services to understand what you said and then chooses an appropriate response (hopefully!). The point in creating AppEliza was not to build a sophisticated AI chat bot, but to test how powerful an application I could create with AppInventor, Google’s new tool for Android phone application development. I allowed myself one day and one day only to complete the application. I was stunned to discover that in that paltry amount of time I could build a feature rich working application that made use of advanced computing features like speech recognition and text-to-speech on a mobile computing platform. I did not have to bury myself in heaps of Java code and XML manifests, instead I simply dragged and dropped colored blocks around a canvas using an editor with a friendly graphical user interface. The next morning, almost as an afterthought, I added the Twitter support in a little more than an hour.
Like the famous ELIZA chat-bot program from years gone by, AppEliza relies on ambiguity to appear smarter than it is. It uses simple text parsing and matching to respond to certain key phrases and trigger words, especially in relation to feelings and family, while trying to "fake it" the rest of the time. It can also log your session to a Twitter account.
A huge congratulations and a hearty thank you to Google for having the vision to create AppInventor. Now the only barrier between me and my next mobile application is inspiration.
DISCLAIMER: We are not responsible for any damage or liability that may come from using AppEliza. Use at your own risk. AppEliza is not a real therapist but simply a chat-bot intended for entertainment purposes only.
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