Welcome to the website of the KAL9000 series, a software application which aims to enable knowledgeable and useful natural language conversation between the user and a computer system. The name of course is derived from the infamous HAL9000 series computer which features in the science fiction stories of Arthur C. Clarke. I suspect our system is someway from fully emulating HALs capabilities – but its good to have a goal…
 
At first glance you may think that the KAL9000 series is nothing more than another of the numerious ‘chatbot’ programs which can be found on the internet but the KAL9000 series includes a number of significant enhancements, existing or planned,  which, we hope, will set it apart when comparing it to the best of these type of programs.
 
The KAL9000 series has a knowledge base of facts on which to draw whilst making conversation. It will also remember what it is told – in more detail than comparable systems. An example of one enhancement over other systems is the ability of the KAL9000 series to deal with ambiguous meanings in conversation, either by determining the most probable meaning based on the current context and/or recent elements of a conversation or by asking relevant questions to the user in order to clear up the ambiguity.
 
This website hopes to provide source of information from the developers of the KAL9000 series as to the current state of play, plus it gives visitors the chance to comment and ask questions about the system, via the Blog sections of the site.
 
We very much hope enjoy learning about the KAL9000 series and soon, in the not too distant future, conversing with ‘KAL’ yourself.