> > I agree with Robert that 90% of the users will probably not understand the > "active input" field. iCal has a relatively easy job in this regard, as it > has only one different action: creating an event. Of course there is extra > data, like the time, date and place, but not much else. The proposal > already > mentions a number of different actions that can be entered into the field: > starting group chats, adding contacts, sending messages, etc. When you > start > to add every way somebody could try to express "start a group chat with > John > and Steve" in all ~27 languages Adium supports, you're looking at a massive > amount of work. >
The natural place to start would be, of course, English, and then it could be localized, which is the same way any other feature of Adium is developed. I'm not saying that it wouldn't be work, but it might be less work than one might expect-- there are already fairly decent libraries for natural language parsing that would probably work for Adium's purposes (The focus is on English but can be adapted for other languages): http://nltk.org/ http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/software/corenlp.shtml This isn't new technology or anything. At the worst, we could do as well as interactive fiction (text dungeon) games, which have a simple allowable set of commands with synonyms. This would be relatively easy to localize. Of course, this discussion is silly unless someone steps up to the plate and takes the feature... Moses
