Ego

Ego is a personal command-line assistant that provides a flexible, natural language interface (sort of) for interacting with other programs. Think of it as a single-user IRC bot that can be extended with handlers for various natural-language queries.

Installation

Ego requires Ruby. If you already have Ruby installed, run:

$ gem install ego

Usage

Ego responds to natural-language queries at the command-line:

$ ego what can you do?

If you want to interact with ego as a REPL, try:

$ ego --shell

Extending

Ego does very few things out of the box, but it's designed to be extensible! You can personalize ego and teach it to do new things by defining plug-ins, which are small scripts that tell ego what queries to listen for and how to respond to them and can even add entirely new features. Here's what a plug-in looks like that responds to a query beginning with "hello...", "hi...", or "hey..." with its own random greeting:

Ego.plugin do |robot|
  robot.can 'greet you'

  robot.on /^(hello|hi|hey)/i do
    say [
      'Hello.',
      'Hi.',
      'Ciao.',
    ].sample
  end
end

$ ego hello
> Hi.

Let's break that down:

robot.can 'greet you'

This adds a new "capability", which serves as documentation for the user and answers the question "What can this plug-in do?"

robot.on /^(hello|hi|hey)/i ...

This is the condition that determines what queries should invoke the following action. A regular expression is specified to match the query against.

... do
  say [
    'Hello.',
    'Hi.',
    'Ciao.',
  ].sample
end

This is the part that gets run when the pattern matches the query. From here you can do anything you want including deferring to external programs. The robot provides various methods to you to respond to the user. Usually, you'll want to make use of part of the query inside the action. You can access named match groups as block arguments:

Ego.plugin do |robot|
  robot.can 'repeat what you say'

  robot.on /^say (?<input>.+)/i do |input|
    say input
  end
end

Try it out (this one is already included):

$ ego say something
> something

Ego looks for user-defined plug-ins in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ego/plugins/ (that's ~/.config/ego/plugins/ by default), and registers them automatically at runtime. Each plug-in goes in it's own file with an .rb extension (e.g., ~/.config/ego/plugins/my_plugin.rb). Be careful—ego will execute any Ruby scripts in this directory indiscriminately.

See Also

• API documentation
• Examples in the wiki

License

Copyright (C) 2016-2018 Noah Frederick

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.