Using or simulating AIML bots in AGS?

[Hollister Man]

Has anyone ever 'spoken' with an AliceBot?  Some years ago A.L.I.C.E. was given the award for most lifelike computerised personality.  Not really an aI in my opinion, but getting closer.  It works somewhat like the text parser in AGS, using synonyms and recursion to determine the simplest form of what the user was trying to say.  After 'speaking' with Alice, I found that her responses, while sometimes rather dense, were very much more lifelike than most NPC characters.

My question was this.  Would it be possible to make AGS use AIML (by plugin or other means) or to easily simulate it?  I know it can be done by lots of parser 'if' statements, but would it be worthwhile to script an engine for AGS to actually read the AIML code and use that for its language processing?  Alice is composed of a bunch of text documents formatted into a language called AIML.  A parser reads these documents and determines what Alice will say to any given question or statement.

The real benefit is that the characters could all use the same 'core' intelligence, but each have a different individual responses that can override the core personality.  This would greatly reduce the number of "I don't know anything about that" generic NPCs.  You could program it so that townfolk all know about a fair, but only a shopkeeper knows about selling things at the fair, etc; Still having a similar amount of coding than regular 'dumb' NPCs. 

Back to work.