Help Me Make Eddie Less Dumb

As if I don't have enough to do I decided to start building a chat bot. So far I've spent a few hours on it (and by "it" I mean CSS, frankly). Now, Eddie is not supposed to be smart. He's not supposed to be a GPT3 frontend, or really a frontend to anything at all. The idea is to load the page up and get the full Eddie in a javascript document, and then chat to him without interacting with a server backend.

I don't really know how to proceed from this point with Eddie. Right now I just have a function that initiates the chat, and another that takes input from the user. For some reason the user input is read when I Alt+Tab to another window, which I don't get. But that's a minor issue. I'd like to have Eddie's responses in a thread of its own eventually, but for now it would be nice to even have him reply at all!

I'm planning to add a global Eddie object, which can store all sorts of states. And then... I dunno.

Can we make Eddie approach uncanny valley human likeness without machine learning? That'd be cool. A good start could be to just have him reply random stuff like "I am so stoned right now..." or "Okay, I hear you. But I don't really care. Let me tell you this story..."

Relevant Links

"Talk to Eddie" git repo on notabug.org

A demo page with some nice CSS

Lenny the telemarketer troll, which is one inspiration for this.

Loqi, the friendly #indieweb bot on irc.libera.chat.

-- CC0 ew0k, 2021-06-22