karimsa/alfred

a natural language interface for programs

alfred2

a natural language interface for programs.

Why '2'?

alfred "1" was never actually made public but I used it in Detective and a few other private projects. Afterwards, there were a few features I desperately wanted to add in and since 'alfred' was already a package on npm, I decided to go with 'alfred2'.

Usage

This module will expose a function that will create a new alfred stream for usage. The purpose of having a stream is to realize that alfred itself is simply a middleware between your inputs and your code. Due to this, you must first link alfred to some output by piping it out and bring in some line of output (from a stream or whatever else you'd like to use).

For the purposes of this README, we will use stdin as alfred's input and stdout as alfred's output. This will create a sort of REPL with alfred.

For example:

// create a new alfred instance
const alfred = require ( 'alfred2' )();

// push stdin into alfred
process.stdin.pipe(alfred);

// push alfred into stdout
alfred.pipe(process.stdout);

// what gets written to alfred is the natural
// language input, and what alfred outputs is
// what alfred wants to say

Registering a prompt with alfred

alfred uses pennyworth as its prompt-handling library. Therefore, please see the pennyworth docs regarding how to format prompts.

To register the prompt with an action, use alfred.add() with either a function or a generator. For instance, to create a simple hello world prompt that replies with a hello, do:

alfred.add('hi, there.', function* () {
    const age = parseInt(yield 'What is your age?' , 10);
});

License

Licensed under GPL-3.0. See LICENSE.

alfred's Issues

open access to pennyworth

This would allow developers to add pennyworth filters and directives and use them in their commands.

alfred should have a proper router

Function generators are great when the logic within the generator is synchronous but this is rarely the case with programs that converse with the user.