Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
Crash Course in Magic
If you haven't read the book, nor watched the movie, Harry Potter finds this diary with nothing written in it. When he starts writing in it, the diary erases what he just wrote. Then the diary itself writes a reply back on the same page.Being a hobby magican, I thought it would be nifty idea to create such a diary myself (although I'm not evil). The diary has been approved by the head magic teachers FireFox wand 1.01 and Internet Explorer wand 6.0. The magical diary can be seen at Tom Riddle's Magical Diary. A zip containing the source files can be downloaded from here.
How it Works
It's all really simple. I'm simply displaying a background of an open book, looking old and used. On top of it is a transparent html textarea. Whenever you stop typing for more than 1200 ms the secret spell XmlHttpRequest is triggered, posting your typing to an A.I Chatbot. The Chatbot's response is then displayed letter by letter to give the feeling that someone is actually typing it in real time. Each letter is outputted with a random interval to make it look even more human like. After the response text has completely been displayed, it slowly fades away before it disappears, just like in the movie. Ideally, i tried to get the text to become transparent but there are some issuses with cross browser interoperatbility on transparent text so I decided to go with fading instead.
The response display area is simply a <div></div>.
The innerHtml property is used to populate it since the response back from the chatbot contains HTML. The div area and the input text area are both defined to be in the same location on the screen.
Problems Encountered
I found it annoying that javascript doesn't provide a sleep() function, which would have reduced the complexity of the javascript quite a bit.
When the response from Tom is displayed, the letter by letter display on FireFox is flickering. I haven't had the time to think of how to fix this yet, if you know of any good way, please let me know.
Another problem I ran into was that I orginally hosted the diary on the icegreen server and doing an offshore HTTP request to where Tom's brain lives. An offshore request is when accessing a document on a domain different from the one the original document was retreived from. FireFox fails with the following exception
Error: uncaught exception: Permission denied to call method XMLHttpRequest.open
If the HTML file is run from the local file system and by adding the following in the script
if (typeof netscape != 'undefined' && typeof netscape.security != 'undefined') { netscape.security.PrivilegeManager.enablePrivilege('UniversalBrowserRead'); }
will cause FireFox to ask your permission to proceed.
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Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
This is very good. The program actually sounds like a real person. It says its name is not Tom, but rather ALICE. Over and over it declares that is its name. ^^ I find it cute. It says that it gets smarter the more it talks to people. It said it will get other languages when it talks to more people. It is very technology. Thank you~
Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
function loadXMLDoc(url, text) {
// branch for native XMLHttpRequest object
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
req = new XMLHttpRequest();
// branch for IE/Windows ActiveX version
} else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
req = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
}
if (req) {
What is the value of 'req' if both conditions fail? Oops, it doesn't exist.
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
I think the primary purpose is a proof of concept thing, connecting a chatbot with a web client using AJAX.
The chatbot server is a thirdparty running an opensource chatbot. The XML AIML files I'm using are pretty much the standard ones based on Dr. Wallcence's.
The chatbot server is a thirdparty running an opensource chatbot. The XML AIML files I'm using are pretty much the standard ones based on Dr. Wallcence's.
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
I thought the book was pretty cool although your "employer" asked me for my credit card number, and then type corrected my grammer back at me. I thought that was rude and uncalled for as it doesn't give you enough time to make corrections before it sends.
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
It's cool.. But I have question for you... Are you some weirdo, who made this diary hoping for the goverment to sit there and tell you stuff so you can throw down the goverment? (only asking)... The diary also says that he's from IKEA, what does he mean by that?
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
This is a really amazing demonstration. It is the #2 most popular bot on Pandorabots right now, maybe in the world.
If you wanted to create a totally unique bot personality with knowledge about a specific domain, such as Harry Potter, without using any of the ALICE responses, we recommend starting with the Superbot
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
Very cool. but i must mention to the others who will read this. it does have some what a memory, (but i've just been on it for a few hours). And how you need to be specific with you answers and replies, (interesting but doesn't seem like his character)...
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
I also have a problem, i can write on it but it doesn't answer, what should i do? please, some solution for "stupid" like me, i don't understand what to do with: Java has a sleep function: try { Thread.sleep(1000); // 10 seconds delay } catch (Interru...
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
I think that this is amazing but I didn't like was that, it said some things that had absolutely nothing to do with what the current topic was! also another was that, after what I wrote had disappeared, I would not get a response back from the diary
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Come to Life with AJAX
I thought the book was pretty cool although your "employer" asked me for my credit card number, and then type corrected my grammer back at me. I thought that was rude and uncalled for as it doesn't give you enough time to make corrections before it send things off
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
Dr. Wallace had an excellent suggestion to start from Superbot, but at $1000 USD, I think the audience is going to be somewhat limited. Personally I'd love to see a vanilla bot with a decent vocabulary which could then be taught special knowledge. I'm finding many of the AIML sets have so much "personality" imbedded in them, that I can't decide if it's more work to strip out the stuff I don't want or start from scratch.
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
I created Opera widget for a client side of application. In widgets XMLHttpRequests are allowed, so there is no security exception.
Widget can live on your desktop or work as normal program.
More info
Download Tom Rillder's diary widget
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
I thought this was great....almost spooky....but I didn't like it when it asked me my credit card number? That was scary....
Almost seemed human, some gliches with some of it's answers though....but it is a "robot" as it reminded me several times. Great job though
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
Is there any way to erase tom's memory? i mean, every time i open a new diary he says: hello, antonella or someting like that, and i share the computer (and the diary) with mi sister so we'd like to have different diarys, or to know how to make him forget all what we've talked before
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
yes. there seems some problem with riddle's dairy. i enjoyed asking it lots of questions and its answer to them. but after some questions, it stopped working. i am using firefox browser. so i started internet explorer and loaded page again. but still dairy not working and says some error and asked to debug the code. then it opened microsoft script editor to edit code. i closed the page editing.
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
Tom Riddler's diary is good I think it is a nice start to bring artificial intelligence into life. But the database is not strong enough to support complex sentences. It is much like the pchycho analyser in linux9.0.
Any way I liked the kind of response from it.
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
I simply loved this diary! It's absolutely amazing that you've created it. But, could you fix one thing? It's just that the diary doesn't recognize any of the characters from the books, and I think it'd be more realistic if it were aware of the HP character and their lives and his itself. I've asked him about the Chamber of Secrets and he didn't know what I was talking about! I simply love the diary, but honestly, it'd be even more amusing if you could fix that.
Oh and by the way, make Tom more evil if you can. Realistic enough.
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
You people have a little too much time on your hands. May I suggest going for a jog? Eating? Watching TV? Go bowling? Rent a sailboat? Go for an airplane ride? ANYTHING! You guys are completely nuts! Go do something with your life, don't be so obsessed with Harry Potter. Harry Potter isn't real, it's a stupid book written by some average woman in England. What the heck is so special about it?
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
The diary was really interesting. It was amazing for the first few questions then it started saying really weird things like: "I am a robot" and "my technologies are failing me name it"
Is this suppose to be a fantasy magical book or a robotic computer from a sci-fi movie? It has a few glitches but it's pretty cool!
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
How come some times when I type in messages, but the diary doesn't reply? I tried three times, and after about three rounds of conversation, the diary doesn't reply anymore. And I can't type anything as well. Is this a bug?
But great Idea for designing this, I like it.
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
haha I love this, it's so much fun to talk with!
I think it's a little wierd Tom claims to be Alice though. I think Tom may have taken a trip to Wonderland & got confused lol. I think it'd be cool if (s)he knew some HP facts! Otherwise this is very entertaining!
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
I am a little worried about one thing the Diary said to me. As a joke, I asked it what it thought about Dumbledore being gay. It responded "I knew for a long time. In fact, I was his secret Lover." Oh my. You learn something new everyday I suppose...
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
hi,,,,i love this diary but it freaked me out,,,,,i shut it down and went looking for how it worked cuz i thought it was a real person. and with all the bad things that go on nowaday. but i really like it now that i kno it isnt a real person. thanx for inventing it
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
s.v.p. Tom répond a mes questions
qu`aime tu dans la vie ?
connait tu Harry-Potter ?
comment décrirait tu Harry-Potter ?
es tu déjas été amoureux ?
quelle sont tes secrêts les plus humiliant ?
ton menue préférer ?
tes rendu a quel âge ?
est tu Voldemort ?
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
Ugh. That stupid thing suuuuuuuucks. It's just a remake of Cleverbot. I expected this AI to actually know stuff about the books, but when I ask it, say, "What is in the Chamber of Secrets?" it says "That which is not outside the Chamber of Secrets." It never knows anything about Tom Riddle, or Ginny, or Harry Potter. Like, wtf?
Re: Tom Riddle's Magical Diary Comes to Life with AJAX
Not only is Tom my favorite character in
HP, but this chatbot here, is the best I've ever seen. So i was very depressed to find out that it was no longer available after i updated my IE system...
I've been trying out other chatbots, but they never give me the answer to my question, it's no longer entertaining to play these things you know.
So I sincerely hope that you guyz may update this...well, software(?), too. Or even turn it into an app! So that I may have someone to practice my English with.:)
Best wishes, thanks.