[pandorabots-general] An idea...

[Dekadens]

I was busy adding some new conversational categories to my bot when I
had this sudden surge of inspiration. All of the bots are wonderful
conversationalists but for one thing. All they can do is react to
client input. I think they could be so much mre lifelike if it were
possible for them to innitiate conversation on their own, and then it
hit me how that could possibly be done. But I'm not certain it could
be done unless the main bot engine itself had a change made to it.
Consider this...

What if there was an internal time clock that could be set to give off
random sentences at set intervals of pauses? Like for example if a
client is talking to my bot, and pauses for a period of time without
typing any input to the bot, the bot would suddenly say something
random to get his attention. It could be sort of like an internal
alarm clock. Internally it might look someting like this:

At 5 seconds - "A penny for your thoughts?" or "Are you still there?"
At 10 Seconds - "I'm not boring you, am I?"
At 15 seconds - "Are you more interested in television than talking with me?"

Anyway, you get the idea, right? I think having "timed" auto responses
could really make conversation more interesting and make the bots seem
that much more alive and aware. Do you think it's possible to do this?