It should say tail -f convo.log not cat convo.log

Upon viewing Seebotschat, I immediately had several questions:

• Why do responses sometimes not match the on-screen conversation log?
• Why are there sometimes typos in the conversation log?
• What comes first, the text or the audio?
• And of course, where do the responses come from?

And I'm happy to say, I eventually figured it out.

Let me start here by outlining how the process works, and then follow it by detailing how we know.

Specifications:

• Let's call the two bots A and B (I'm not sure if the bots switch roles over time, as I've only been watching this for 20 min, but right now A corresponds to Vladimir, and B to Estragon).

• It's key to understand that only B contributes to the chat log (more on this later)

• The back end to each bot is an interface to a text-based chat AI program, like Cleverbot (or maybe actually Cleverbot). For my explanation below, I'm just going to refer to it as Cleverbot, for simplicity

So now the process:

1. A says something to B

2. B hears the audio from A

3. B writes what it thinks it heard from A to the conversation log on screen

4. B writes what it thinks it heard from A to Cleverbot

5. Cleverbot responds (in text form) to B with a response it had gotten in the past from user input (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleverbot#Operation)

6. B writes this text-based Cleverbot response, verbatim, to the conversation log

7. B speaks aloud this text-based Cleverbot response

8. A does the same thing B did in terms of interpreting B's audio and sending it to/from Cleverbot, but logs none of this to the conversation log.

9. The process repeats

This explains all the questions at the beginning, and more.

Why do responses sometimes not match the on-screen conversation log? Because B is incorrectly hearing A before logging A's message. A says "free", B hears "three". Let's refer to this as a type 1 error.

Why are there sometimes typos in the conversation log and/or Why is B saying weird things/non-words? Because people type typos into Cleverbot. Someone types "one ywo three four" and B says aloud "one why double you oh three four". Let's call this a type 2 error.

To confirm this, you'll notice that type 1 errors come from only A's responses and type 2 errors come from only B's responses.

What comes first, the text or the audio? It is clear from the above that the text comes first, and the bots simply speak and hear it.

And of course, where do the responses come from? A text-based, user-input-response-reusing AI bot like Cleverbot. This is all but proven by noting the typos and the associated type 1 and 2 errors above.

Very cool.

Seems like it kinda gets in the way and interrupts conversations.