MODOC

• Mobile
• Organism
• Devoted
• Only to
• Chatting

TL;DR

Demo code for an interactive iOS chatbot built without web services (fully local) in Swift

Background

This app was built for a Halloween Trunk-or-Treat event (the theme was "VillainCon"). The area for this was decorated in green with HYDRA logos. The app was running in single-app mode on an iPad, with a sign on the left saying "say HELLO MODOC to start" and one on the right that said "when he says GOODBYE you are done. go away."

More History

I've explored most of the available chatbot services, and none seem to have evolved since the early 90's. In most cases, they are still database lookups of cascading if-then-else trees.

(Or most recently, in the case of Facebook Messaging and Apple Business Chat, they have devolved to a few buttons that people have to click to choose-their-own-adventure into a funnel)

Back around 2001, I had a concept for character-driven chatbots...a series of chatbots that could be talked to, which would have their own personalities, and a story would coalesce upon talking to them. The more you talked to them, the more details would come to the surface, which you could use to interrogate other chatbots - and solve a mystery or complete a story arc.

This is the beginning of my dusting off that old idea, filing off the serial numbers, and creating a new interactive gaming framework.

Copyrights

All copyrights of MODOK and HYDRA that are used in this open-source project belong to Marvel Studios. All image and naming rights are reserved.

The source-code for FaceManager (managing the animated face images) and DialogueManager (managing the text strings that are used in a dialogue) are under the Apache 2.0 license and may be reused or refactored as needed in your personal projects.