Inspiration

I was inspired the multitude of artificial intelligence applications that could actually talk to people, and a random xkcd comic I read a long time ago that mentioned Markov chains (I can't remember which one).

What it does

You name the program and you talk to it on the command line!

How I built it

I built it using Java and the lifetime history of my Facebook messages. I downloaded my own Facebook archive and used the messages.htm file for conversation. In order to make the data readable, I learned some Perl to sanitize the file into only lines of conversation. Then, I plugged that data into

Challenges I ran into

I wanted to do this in Node.js, but after trying to learn JavaScript first, I put it off so I could actually work on the project and not just learn a new language.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am proud of my newfound skills in regular expressions.

What I learned

I learned an insane amount of debugging and how to actually implement the Markov chains. I don't entirely know if I even understand Markov Chains, but the program is sort of able to stutter some gibberish, so I think it sort of works.

What's next for Name Your Own AI

Next I hope for it to be web based--time to learn that Node.js.

*Note: You can download the file to test, but there's no message data to fill it with. I decided not to upload my Facebook messages with my most intimate friends to Github for reasons!

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