Wilbur
Wilbur is a site navigation assistant for this project. You should be able to use Wilbur to help you locate information about specific topics on this site. Because Wilbur is able to process natural language, interacting with him should feel relatively natural, but you may find his sense of humour to be a bit odd (partially his creator's fault).
We have also built an activity around Wilbur. In this activity, we are asking our users to train the language-processing AI used by Wilbur. The instructions for that activity can be found here.
Wilbur was developed by Stefan and initially envisaged as an assistant that would process user requirements (operating system, preferred language, etc) for virtual assistants and selecting one or two which meet them. Unfortunately, time limitations and lack of experience with web programming made this too difficult to accomplish in time for the launch of this OER.
Some of the Python code is already written, so if time allows, Wilbur may still gain some of his intended functionality. But it's unlikely to happen this week.
Wilbur was built using the free tools available through API.ai, which limits his abilities. For example, he is not able to provide the user with direct links to content; that's why he only provides the locations of information and not direct links. API.ai sells access to various pre-built abilities and only the basic conversational ability is provided for free. This is why Wilbur can't do basic math and tends to respond with sarcasm and hostility to any such queries.
API.ai is now owned by Google and likely uses Google's AI for its language processing.
