Aliza (or ALIZA) is a simple chatbot that I made as a submission for PyJac Rebooted.

Aliza's name is a portmanteau of the names Alice (A.L.I.C.E.) and Eliza who are older chatbots that Aliza was based on. Aliza even uses a custom markup language that is very similar to AIML. You can read more about the .alzml file syntax in the notes directory of this repo.

Aliza uses a merkle tree data structure using JavaScript's builtin Map objects. This implementation is similar to how ALICE's interpreter is implementated as according to the AIML foundation website (checkout the "AIML Pattern Matching" section).

PyJac is a hackathon run by students at UTM. Participants are given a selection of prompts to choose and are then given a week to code and submit it with a video demonstration.

Aliza was developed using modern / ES6 JavaScript.

I recommend running Aliza on a local server. To do this, I personally use python3's http.server. If you don't already have python installed you can get it here

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/bdon-htb/chatbot-js

And then run a local server.

cd chatbot-js/src
python -m http.server 8000

Then open your browser of choice (I suggest in private browsing), navigate to localhost:8000 and the webpage should load.