I have read the users manual and am familiar with chatbots via AIML but there must be something very simple that I don’t understand.

I ran the simpletopics.top example which works fine.  Then I began modifying it to become an replacement for an AIML NPC that I had developed earlier.  The new topics I added to simpletopics did not work.  Finally I reduced the scrip to:

topic: ~WHATAREYOU()

t: Death, soon I will be your only friend.

t: I am Death, the Grim Reaper, the Great Equalizer.  I have many more names.

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This topic is not recognized even though it seems to build correctly.  I have tried deleting everything in TOPICS and USERS and doing rebuilds of 0 and 1 but get the same response.

Hey, what were we talking about.  CS does not seem to recognize the topic I have created.  I realize that it is probably something very basic but I don’t see it.

Thanks.

Chatscript “recognizes” a topic either because the control script calls it (or some other topic calls it) OR because it has keywords of the topic that are in common with keywords of the input.  You have no keywords so it cant do that, and I presume you havent modified the control script to call respond(~...) or gambit(~...)

I am not ready to modify the control script beyond renaming the bot.

The users manual suggest that what I tried (and my example used to be much more complex, but I am trying to learn) would work:

“Topics do not have to have keywords. Catch-all topics can be created for various
purposes which have no keywords – they have the parens but no words within”

...and this example from the Tutorial lead me astray (my wife will tell you I am easily lead):

topic: ~introductions []
t: Hello, talk to me!

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BTW the second example works…but not mine which is quite similar.

Thanks for the insight.

the ~introductions topic works because the control script explicitly calls it and the bot makes it the default topic to start with.