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.