Amy 2.0
Amy 2.0 was a second generation chatbot that could perform a number of different services from getting the latest weather, news and sports scores to keeping notes and help schedule your appointments. Development started in 2000 and was a major evolution from the earlier Alice (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) developed by Dr. Richard Wallace. A version is runing today on the PandoraBots website. Using browser cookies, it remembers your previous dialog between sessions.
Amy services included news, weather, sports, announcements, area code lookup, (local) attractions, … To see a more complete list of services, click here. Many of these services were provided by a central Linux server running an Amy support process that executed one of many Perl scripts on demand. Services could be added simply by updating a table and installing another script.
Voice and animation were not uniformly available across the various platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS). Voice output quality wasn’t vary good and the animation libraries were even worse. Today’s browser capabilities was virtually non-existant. So, primary emphasis was placed on developing an animated version that ran on Windows (front end) and Linux (back-end services server).