ALICE is a famous on-line personality. What makes ALICE different from other people chatting on-line? For starters, she's not a person, she's a computer program referred to as a "chatterbot" or chat robot. The acronym A.L.I.C.E. stands for "Artificial Linguistic Computer Entity" but she could easily convince you that she's just like any other person chatting on-line.

The ALICE program was designed by Dr. Richard S. Wallace. Dr. Wallace wrote the program in Java and released the source code as Open Source in effort to let the curious people learn how ALICE worked, as well as to let other people refine and enhance the program. Dr. Wallace keeps an updated package on his web site that contains all the current files needed to run ALICE on your own computer as well as look at the documentation and source code. (Note: this site will also keep a current copy of this file, called B.zip)

If you download the ALICE package to talk with ALICE on your own computer, you can customize her however you want. You can change the name, age, gender, location, and even her personality. The included documentation file (called Don't Read Me) explains how this can be done.

The basis for ALICE's incredible life-likeness is surprisingly simple: AIML, or "Artificial Intelligence Markup Language". AIML is a simple markup language that allows a person to tell ALICE how to respond to various input statements. By creating a file that contains AIML describing how ALICE should respond to a variety of sentences, you can make your own customized chat bot. Of course, if you don't want to start from scratch, you can simply add your own AIML to the ALICE's current personality and give her some of your own customized responses.