Complimentary Peanuts
The "reading a command" activity is not the only point at which we can interact with snippets, as it happens; it is merely the most useful. "The player's command" can be consulted at other points, however, as in this example of your somewhat deaf (or distracted, or simply cussed) Aunt:
The topic understood is also a snippet, so that whenever one has been generated, we can treat it in the same way as "the player's command":
This is superior to checking "the player's command" because we do not want ASK MARTHA ABOUT FRENCH FRIES to trigger the "Martha" keyword, only the "french fries" keywords.
| topic | commentary |
| "shuttle" | "'Shuttles! I hate shuttles,' Aunt Martha grumbles. 'Give me an airplane! AIRPLANE.'" |
| "airplane/airport" | "'Those were the days,' Aunt Martha agrees, plainly reliving the days when she wore a blue-and-white uniform and passed out packets of salted pretzels." |
| "rations" | "'Do you think there are any peanuts in there?' she asks in a wistful tone." |
Test me with "martha, get in the shuttle / martha, for pity's sake, do you see an airplane around here? / martha, pass me the rations".
From here you have an excellent view of the colony world, which looks... well, it looks discouragingly orange. But terraforming is in progress.
Your shuttle awaits.
You can also see Aunt Martha and a stack of rations here.
>(Testing.)
>[1] martha, get in the shuttle
"Shuttles! I hate shuttles," Aunt Martha grumbles. "Give me an airplane! AIRPLANE."
>[2] martha, for pity's sake, do you see an airplane around here?
"Those were the days," Aunt Martha agrees, plainly reliving the days when she wore a blue-and-white uniform and passed out packets of salted pretzels.
>[3] martha, pass me the rations
"Do you think there are any peanuts in there?" she asks in a wistful tone.
This means that Martha will respond to keywords regardless of the setting in which they occur. For instance:
This is not the stuff of which Loebner-winning chatbots are made, admittedly, but it is occasionally a useful alternative to stricter modes of command-parsing.