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copied!<blockquote> <p>This is not AI in the sense of taking any input and truly understanding it.</p> </blockquote> <p>It most certainly is! You follow this up by stating exactly that:</p> <blockquote> <p>I'm not referring to having some way to hold a conversation with a user. It's about inferring what a user wants, checking to see if there is an applicable service to be provided, identifying the inputs needed and overlaying that on top of what's missing from the request, then asking the user for the remaining information. That's it! :-)</p> </blockquote> <p>Inference is at the heart of any topics in AI. What did the user mean? What did the user want? What information should I fetch? How do I parse that information and decide what the answer is?</p> <p>You're essentially trying to design a state-of-the-art AI system, that uses a combination of NLP techniques to parse natural language queries and then using (maybe) a learning algorithm to determine how to perform the search, possibly hitting a knowledge base, or maybe Google (which also requires a process to parse the returned data to find the answer).</p> <p>If there is any way you can constrain how input is entered (i.e. how the query is asked), that will help. But then you'll essentially be building a Web form... which has been done a million times over.</p> <p>In short, you're attempting to create a very complex system but you explicitly don't want to use any of the relevant techniques. If you're attempting to use regexs to do all of this, good luck to you. Because that's one heck of a deep and dark rabbit hole into which I would not want to fall.</p> <p>But if you insist, start by finding a good book on NLP, because that's where you'll have to start anyway.</p>

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