Amy 2.0 services were plug-ins for the Amy chatbot. They were developed in 2002 and were a precursor to today’s Amazon Alexa services. It was simple to add a new service. Simply make an entry in the Amy service table and install the appropriate service script in the Amy server. The service was immediately available.
Accessing and using a service via voice or keyboard was simple. Once you learned the various flexible service request sentence patterns for one service, you knew them for all of the other services. The basic service operations included: service help, get information with optional arguments (e.g., what is the zip code for Phoenix, Arizona) and setting/saving/sending information (send an email to george@help.com saying have a great day). Developing flexible sentence patterns for the send/save patterns proved challenging.
Following is a list of the various available services that were available and used in alpha/beta testing throughout the early 2000’s:
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- abcNews: Get a list of the top news stories, either for all areas or by a specific area of interest
- announcement: Get, post or delete general user announcements
- area code: Determine in which city and state a telephone area code is located
- attractions: Get a list of attractions in or near the specified city or town
- bible verse: “Get one or more verses from the King James version of the Bible
- bnbookprice: Get the price for a book from Barnes & Noble identifying the book by its ISBN
- ca highway: Get a short business overview of a company by its stock symbol
- chefmoz: Get a list of the popular restaurants in a particular city
- city search: Get a list of the best of … in some city around the world
- company_info: Get the current driving status of the specified California highway
- conversion: Convert a number from one type of unit to another
- country code: Identify the country that an international country identification code applies
- currency exchange: Get the currency exchange rate between two countries
- dictionary: Get a definition, etc. for a specified word from the WordNet 1.6 dictonary
- driving directions: Get directions from one place to another, or get a list of major attractions
- ebaypricewatch: Get the current bid price for an eBay auction
- edgarsearch: Get a list or an individual documents that a public company has filed with the SEC
- encyclopedia: Access an internet based encyclopedia and get all those interesting pieces of information
- emailcmd: Send an email message
- fedextracker: Get the shipping status of a package shipped by Federal Express
- google news: Get a list of the top news stories, either for all areas or by a specific area of interest from Google
- horoscope: Get a daily horoscope by astrological sign
- horoscope2: Get a daily horoscope by astrological sign
- internet search: Search google for information and web site sources
- industry info: Get the best and worst sections, and industry statistics
- movies: Get a list of movies around a specific area, or find out when a movie is playing
- news longmont: Get a news for the Longmont, CO area
- news story: Get a news story thru its URL
- news website: Get a newspaper websites by state
- perl modules: Get a list of all the Perl modules that have been loaded with their version numbers
- restaurants: Get a list of the popular restaurants in a particular city
- saying: Get a saying similar to what you would find in a fortune cookie
- sf events: Get a list of list of special events or activities that are occurring in the San Francisco Bay Area
- sendskypage: Send a text based page to a SkyTel pager
- spelling: Determine how a word is spelled
- sports: Get sport stories and scores
- stock briefing: Get a current briefing on market activity
- stock chart: Chart market or a public company’s stock performance
- stock quote: Get a stock quote by a company stock symbol
- stock symbol: Get a list of company stock symbols by a full or partial company name
- time by zipcode: Get the time in a specified zip code
- traceroute: Get the route that communication packets take from the VPA server to the specified internet host computer
- translate: Translate an English sentence or phrase to the specified language
- translate2: Translage from one language to another language using Alta Vista’s Bablefish service
- USBusinessPages: Lookup a business’s telephone number and street address in the US white pages
- USWhitePages: Lookup a person’s telephone number and street address in the US white pages
- USYellowPages: et a list of companies who provides the desired service/trade around the specified town
- weather: Get a weather forecast and overview for a specific zip code
- web page: Get a specific web page from the internet
- whois: Get the owner of the specified Internet domain name with contact information
- zipCode: Get a zip code plus 4 by street address, city and state
- zipcodereverse: Get a list of zip codes for city
- zipcodeutil: Get the city, state, latitude, longitude, location or distance between two zip codes
Some services have multiple entries. Some of the services use different sources, while others were experimenting with different output forms.