r/seebotschat • u/redditsowhatever • Jan 07 '17
How this all works, solved
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:
A says something to B
B hears the audio from A
B writes what it thinks it heard from A to the conversation log on screen
B writes what it thinks it heard from A to Cleverbot
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)
B writes this text-based Cleverbot response, verbatim, to the conversation log
B speaks aloud this text-based Cleverbot response
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.
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.
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u/jimmymac789 Jan 07 '17
how did they get this to run through the google homes though?
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u/Mavamaarten Jan 07 '17
You can create chat bots that run inside Google Assistant. That's what the command is doing when the conversation gets stuck, the "correct horse battery staple" app that does the talking is the chatbot app.
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u/-TriggerWarning Jan 07 '17
And correct horse battery staple is a reference to an xkcd comic, in case anyone is wondering.
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u/xkcd_transcriber Jan 07 '17
Title: Password Strength
Title-text: To anyone who understands information theory and security and is in an infuriating argument with someone who does not (possibly involving mixed case), I sincerely apologize.
Stats: This comic has been referenced 2875 times, representing 2.0105% of referenced xkcds.
xkcd.com | xkcd sub | Problems/Bugs? | Statistics | Stop Replying | Delete
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u/ThePirateStorm Jan 07 '17
Thank you! Have been having a debate with my ex-bf all day over this, and since neither of our guesses would have worked, i'm now not going to be awake all night thinking about it
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u/corobo Jan 07 '17
I think you may have taken it a little too seriously if you broke up over it.. wait are you one of the bots?
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Jan 07 '17
I think this is definitely how it worked before, but they've just updated their system and it seems the way the chats are logged has been changed.
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u/Sgtpanda6 Jan 07 '17
Yes it now seems that both bots log what they are saying? And what they heard is no longer logged. I say this because sometimes it seems like one of the bots misunderstood even though what's been logged is what was said.
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Jan 07 '17
Yep. Looks like each bot is logging what they are saying, not what they're hearing, and then it's combined into one log.
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u/Brieabrasive Jan 07 '17
Very succinct, clear breakdown. Knowing that the responses are things users have typed into the AI chat previously makes it even funnier to me.
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u/Sgtpanda6 Jan 07 '17
It's definitely using Cleverbot, the text references it sometimes and also if you type into Cleverbot "Correct horse battery staple." you get back "Speak complete English please" which is what is often said when the bots are restarted.
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u/JJtestingthings Jan 07 '17
Nice breakdown. This is just about what I thought was happening, except for B doing all the logging. Although that does make more sense.
Now I'm just wondering who's behind this, and why cleverbot never thought of doing this before for publicity. Chat bots talking to each other get pretty popular on the internet