More about Jarvis the Chat Bot

August 30, 2022

I mentioned that I created a chat bot named Jarvis. Since then I've been asked a few times what goes into creating Jarvis. I thought I'd take the time and explain what is going on behind the scenes.First off Jarvis sits on top of database with the following tables.

  • word - A library of known words he found online
  • keywords - collections of words that Jarvis thought went together
  • responses - Response that can be given to a user

There are other tables, but that is the core ones.Now I loaded Jarvis with the library that ELIZA the original chat bot used. That system had a number of keywords and responses to those key words. For example: If the user had typed "Hi", there were 3 possible responses. "How are you?", "Hello", "Welcome".Jarvis would randomly pick one of those.I also hand entered in some other "choice" keywords and phrases.The next step was to have him learn from input. So when ever Jarvis puts out a response that includes a question (question mark), he would wait for the response and tag it as a possible "answer" to that question. That way when another user asked the question of Jarvis this was in his possible responses.So for example, Jarvis might start off with a memory like the following:

Key: How are you?
Possible Responses: "Good", "I'm sad" or "I'm happy".

Let's say he had the following conversation with user 1.


Jarvis: Hi
User 1: Hello Jarvis
Jarvis: How are you?
User 1: I'm good, I had bacon this morning.

Now Jarvis' memory looks like the following:


Key: How are you?
Possible Responses: "Good", "I'm sad" or "I'm happy" or "I'm good, I had bacon this morning"

So when user 3 comes along the conversation looks like this...


Jarvis: Hello
User 3: Hi Jarvis, How are you?
Jarvis: I'm good, I had bacon this morning
User 3: That sounds good
Jarvis: how are you?
User 3: Hungry

Jarvis used the first users answers and he also learned a new answer to the question "How are you?"


Key: How are you?
Possible Responses: "Good", "I'm sad" or "I'm happy" or "I'm good, I had bacon this morning", "Hungry"

CuriosityAt first I built him so that any response that was a question was given priority. But that lead to Jarvis asking to many questions. So Jarvis now has a curiosity factor. The more curious he is, the more likey that he will give a response that is in the form of a question. This sponsors more responses for him.You can increase or decrease curiosity by typing "moreCurious" or "lessCurious" into the text box.Peeking into Jarvis BrainThere is a checkbox "Peek into Brain". Clicking this will let you see into Jarvis process. It shows you the following:

  • Words gathered from your input
  • Last 5 words learned (popularity is in parens)
  • The Keywords or phrases that were triggered based on your words
  • Selected/Best Keyword is highlights in bold
  • The Responses triggered from the best keyword
  • The last 5 learned keyword phrases
  • The last 5 learned responses

ScoreingJarvis tracks each chat session and gives it a score. Keep in mind each possible response is scored. Anytime Jarvis uses an response with a score higher than 0, he adds one to the session score.This should lead to interesting sessions having a higher score, but I have not thoroughly tested that.Jarvis can be found at http://www.mobeamer.com/lab/jarvisRandomnessThere are two places where Jarvis uses randomness.First: Sometimes after finding all the keyphrases from the users input. Multiple keypharases have the same score. In this case, Jarvis will randomly select one of them.Second: Sometimes after finding all responses from a keyphrase, mulitple responses have the same score. In this case, Jarvis will randomly select one.The random function uses php's in-built rand() function. Which is not 100% random but close enough for me.

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