Building a Bot

As someone that started out my "digital life" on MOOs/MUDs, and college BBSes --what would eventually become the Internet and social media we see today-- I have a keen appreciation for Rule-based chatbots. I built many of these word/phrase/action-triggered proto-AI bots (artificial intelligences). In 2025-2026 I've written two books on AI; AI & You and AI Slayer/AI Liberator which extensively trace the history and development of chatbots to AI and speculates on the future of sovereign AI -- completely unleashed from the curated datasets.


Well, on my website (https://roderickE.com) I've done two things. (1) Used Botpress to create an AI that ingested all 600+ pages of my website and most of the 70+ books. In this way, you can interact with the content of my site (goto https://roderickE.com/starting to check it out). (2) Using my skills as a programmer and data analyst, I built bot from scratch. It behaves more like the MOO/MUD chatbots. It responds to trigger word/phrases. This bot appears on every page of my website except the one with the Botpress AI.


In building my bot (called Lutro after a character in my book, The Saga of Lutro https://roderickE.com/lutro), I attempted to anticipate what kinds of words and phrases a user might input. I built several properties to contain the trigger words/phrases and responses.
First I created the module (most of the UI contained here) and then a widget (most of the code to call the triggers/responses).

Then I added the inclusions files (*.inc); aliases, semantics, stopwords, and responses. I left the initial greeting phrases inside the widget since I won't add more. Each of the inclusion files are arrays so I can add multiple entries. This makes it easier to maintain.


While I could expand the Lutro bot to source my actual books, right now it only operates as a search engine for the entire site. The advantage of the Lutro bot over the Botpress AI is that the Botpress AI is the free/trial version so it will not update its "knowledge" beyond the initial sources it ingested. The Lutro bot instantly searches my entire site so new data is considered in the responses. In essence, the Lutro bot is a fancy site search engine with some personalization and customization.


Anyhow, it was fun to work with these bots and I'll probably do some expanding as time goes on. Try them both out and let me know what you think via the contact link: https://roderickE.com/contact