The Billy Project

In Pursuit of Artificial Intelligence

BILLY

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Latest news

November 4, 2005 - Updated the Links page. Namely, added a link to an article at ComputorEdge about Billy and Daisy, and updated the link to the online Billy.

January 18, 2004 - Released Billy 4.1. Several new features have been added, and many bugs have been fixed. Download it, or check out the release notes. Also, if you are upgrading from 4.0, check out the new FAQ.

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Feedback

Billy is developed by Gregory G. Leedberg. If you have any suggestions, questions, or comments, feel free to send it to me.

Overview

Billy is more than just a program. It's a project. It's an effort to, someday, make a computer progam you can talk to, and which is indistinguishable from a human. The program can be fun and amusing, but the technology behind the program can have many real-world applications. The true focus here is learning. Just imagine, someday, a computer which can learn from its msitakes, and can act truly intelligent when interacting with its users. In this case, the goal is a computer which is capable of learning language and grammar from a human. There will be several "generations" of the Billy technology, as I try and achieve the goal of being just like a human in intelligence and learning capacity.

Billy 4 is the product of several separate research projects, all of which looked at discrete areas of artificial intelligence, and each of which have become a subsystem within Billy The notable subsystems within Billy 4 are:

  • Natural Language Processing enables Billy to extract meaning from what you say
  • Machine Learning and Natural Language Generation enables Billy to observe what you say and learn to produce his own free-form responses
  • Conversation fingerprinting, allowing Billy to identify you just by talking to you
  • Knowledge base and question answering allows Billy to learn facts from you within the conversation, and then answer questions about what he has learned
  • Natural language math evaluation enables Billy to answer basic math questions
  • Keyword-matching rules allow Billy, as a fallback, to use rules and scripts to produce responses

Highlights

For the latest version of Billy, go to the Download section!

Who Created Billy?

Billy has been actively developed since 1999, entirely by Gregory G. Leedberg.