New software called CyN allows you to talk to the OpenCyc commonsense inference engine from AIML chatbots.

A chatbot is a program with human-like personality that allows for natural-language conversations with computers. OpenCyc is the open-source version of Cyc technology, the world’s largest and most complete general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine. AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) is an XML type language with familiar HTML-like syntax (tags, etc.) that allows for creating chatbots such as ALICE with various personalities and kinds of knowledge.

Version 1.0 of OpenCyc, a publicly accessible subset of the Cyc knowledge base, will include 6,000 concepts (an upper ontology for all of human consensus reality) and 60,000 assertions about the 6,000 concepts.

The AIML-OpenCyc combination made possible by CyN (CYc + program N) “allows one of the largest, continuous AI projects to be accessed by one of the largest chatbot development communities,” says Daxtron Laboratories chief scientist Kino H. Coursey. That means that “hundreds of person-years of Cycorp commonsense research is now accessible through an easy-to-use scripting front-end, and chatbots now have access to logic and inference. The lack of logic has been one of the big criticisms of chatbots.

“The result is the unique ability to perform logical inference, provide for personality scripting, allow reasoning about information resources, and integrate elements of large-scale pattern matching engines with large-scale inference engines and information sources.”

The free open-source CyN interpreter source code is available for download.