Brief video show AppInventor in action
Robert Oschler, from RobotsRule, sent us an excited message about Android AppInventor and the application he made with it, AppEliza, a modern take on the classic Eliza therapy chat-bot:
AppEliza is a free ELIZA style therapist chat-bot for Android phones. You talk to it and tell it your problems, and it responds via Text To Speech. It can also echo your conversation to a Twitter account. AppEliza incorporates Google’s speech recognition web service and the Eyes-Free Text To Speech package, the former is part of every Android phone and the later is a free download from the Android Marketplace.
The excitement here isn’t the app since AppEliza is a simple pattern based chat-bot that reacts to trigger words and phrases, mainly those dealing with feelings and family, and uses the power of ambiguity to “fake it” the rest of the time. The excitement is due to AppInventor, the tool that was used to create AppEliza in a single day, except for the Twitter support that I added to it this morning and that took a little over an hour.
AppEliza is not up on the Android Marketplace yet but the APK file can be found on our servers as a free download. This web page has the download details.
Hyperbole is a huge problem on the web but I feel confident as a veteran developer to call AppInventor one of the best rapid development tools I have ever used and I am astonished at how fast I am able to create Android applications.
This is so cool! I requested a copy, but I assume that they got hammered with request for AppIneventor once you guys covered it.