Mabel - By David Hamill

Mabel has been developed by Dr David Hamill as a hobby project since late 1997. His aim is to produce a friendly program you can have an interesting chat with. (Judging from her logs, many users seem bent on seducing her). A prime requirement is that she should speak fluent, natural English, without the giveaway grammatical slips that characterise many chatterbots.

Although she may not pass the Turing test, users have had some enjoyable chats with her on a wide range of topics. She works best if you converse with her as you would a human, rather than trying to catch her out. She also seems to prefer women's conversational style to men's.

Mabel currently consists of 2,600 lines of Perl 5 code (plus a database), running as a CGI script on a Unix-based Web server. She contains a heirarchical set of heuristic rules for transforming textual input into textual output. In other words, she's an Eliza derivative of sorts. Don't tell her that, she thinks she's unique...

You can talk to Mabel at http://www.hamill.co.uk/mabel/