Hi there everyone

I’m new here, and apologise if this is in the wrong forum.

I have developed a few small scale chat bots for fun and projects, but it’s simple enough to create a character and their responses from scratch, but I was curious as to some tips people could offer to make a chat bot based off of a fictional character, whether it be Darth Vader, Bart Simpson, Goku etc.?

Naturally one could say that ‘oh just output the responses form the show/movie with what other characters say’ but doing that would be rather limited in the sense of I don’t think there is a response from Darth Vader by asking him: ‘Do you like pizza?’.

It’s nice to use actual movie dialog (to use the Darth Vader example) from time to time, but bear in mind that the phrase “a little goes a long way” is extremely relevant here. It’s better to study the personality involved, instead, and to craft responses with the character’s personality in mind. The trick is to immerse yourself in the character in question as completely as possible (without actually harming others, of course! ), and craft responses as the character, rather than as you “playing” the character (there’s a subtle but distinct difference here). there’s a lot of story telling involved with creating a “standard” chatbot, and even more so if you’re modeling one after a fictional character; and the more popular and famous that character is, the more detailed and involved your research will have to be in order to create a believable chatbot. To use the Vader example once again, Anikin Skywalker has a rich and varied past, full of both positive and negative influences, and his current position of power (and the path he took to get that position) will also have a huge effect on his responses. Needless to say, it’s a great challenge, but can be very rewarding when complete.

> 100 Best Twitter Quote Bots | Meta-Guide.com

As usual, Dave’s experience is spot-on.  There are a tremendous number of Twitter bots built on top of quotation databases or APIs.  In fact, my above webpage is just the tip of the iceberg; because, a lot of the character based, responder bots (aka reply bots) on Twitter are not even listed there.  I believe the Pandorabots SpellBinder tool was built to parse dialog from screenplays, for example.  Film subtitle (captioning) corpora ought to provide ample fodder as well. 

I have been dreaming up an additional module that would do character profiling, for instance on characters in novels or screenplays, in effect going out to “fill in the blanks” with automated research on similar demographic backgrounds….  In other words, what else would a person of that gender, age group, and historic era know about?

If you need a large source of dialogue, I’d pick a character from a long running tv series rather than a movie, preferably one in which ordinary situations occur too. Pandorabots made one of Captain Kirk but its responses are a bit limited because he only had extraordinary adventures.
I’m also thinking that the dialogue, if copied in large quantities, is probably protected by copyrights. So you wouldn’t want to use any Disney characters for instance because their lawyers are known to be pretty zealous, you’d receive a “cease and desist” letter soon enough, and then all your work would be for nothing.
Personally I think a chatbot version of Portal’s GLaDOS would be pretty good fun, and if you get in touch with Valve I think they might just encourage you to make one. They’re pretty receptive about fan initiatives as far as I know.

Pandorabots have a product called Spellbinder which can take transcripts from TV shows etc and make a chatbot from them:
http://pandorabots.com/static/html/PremiumServices/SoftwareSolutions/NewProducts/SpellBinder.html

You will need to add in extra parts yourself but it’s a good start.

Hi guys, thanks heaps for all of your ideas, I’ll have a quick look into that pandorabot.