I have an idea of an AI with which you could communicate to ask questions, teach facts, give orders, and that would have an interactive behavior.
In a console you could write a sentence using a specific syntax. This sentence would be analyzed and interpreted in three different ways. If it ends with a point, then the AI will recognize it as a statement that it should learn and store in its database. If it ends with an interrogation mark, then the AI will interpret it as a question and try to answer it. If it ends with an exclamation mark, then the AI will interpret it as a command and will have to execute it.
To answer questions, it would query its own local knowledge database, as well as online semantic web databases, that is, convert your sentence into SPARQL to query the databases. For example the sentence what has-family Crambidae? (the syntax is not decided yet) would return the list of animals that belong to the Crambidae. The application would implement question words such as what, who, when, where, how-many...
What do I mean by interactive behavior?
The syntax of statements would allow some flexibility and allow you to either ask for something very precise with all details needed to avoid any ambiguity, or omit omit some details which are obvious or which would have a predefined default value. For every other missing piece of information, the AI would first ask for them before executing your command, a bit like a human would do. For example you could ask:
> send email to george
and it would answer something like:
You are not connected to a mail service. Do you want to log in?
> yes
Please enter your email address:
> edward@gmail.com
Please enter your password:
> *********
Do you want to send it to George Jones or George Smith?
> george smith
Ok. Please enter your subject:
and so on.
The guiding rule would be: if someone said that sentence in real life, what would another human answer. But the AI should implement this not trying to be the most realistic possible like some chatbots do to pass the Turing test, but rather trying to consider the best behavior expected from a human: nice, useful, intelligent, obedient...
The whole thing would be developed in Python or Perl because those are powerful languages that I think are adapted for that kind of application.
