This issue might actually predate the actual version of Ultra Hal; I have an issue with how Ultra Hal handles some tables, namely _UserSent and sharedUsersent where stuff is written to both of these tables but it's never accessed in the script(unless I missed it somehow). I've tried triggering a question and answer response from these tables several times and no dice, which is a shame because for some reason a great number of responses relevant to the hal's personality I'm building gets stored in _UserSent; and yes, I know I could just copy and paste those responses over another table, and yes, I know I could modify part of the brain script to include _UserSent, but that just misses the point; why even write stuff to these tables if the brain seemingly never accesses to these responses? The only time I might see a couple of these responses is when the cloud brain randomly decides to grab one of them except with the pronouns reversed, which brings me to the next point...
Check your brain options section in Hal's options menu. If you have Hal set to "learn to cloud only", it won't use these UserSent tables at all. In this mode, the remote cloud tables completely replace local UserSent tables.
If you have Hal set to "mixed cloud/local learning" than it uses both remote cloud data and local UserSent data, but the cloud data takes priority over the local data. This has the effect of usually using the cloud for newer learned information and using the local UserSent for older information learned by Hal 6.x (if you are using an imported brain). In some rare instances it may use the UserSent table due to a difference in the learning algorithms used in the 2 methods.
If you have Hal set to "local learning only" than it will only use the local UserSent tables and won't learn to the cloud tables.
Most of the Brain functions are pretty basic and the script is in most part very user friendly, with plenty of author comments making it easy to understand even if one is clueless about vbscript. An exception to this happens to be the new cloud functions. Is it possible we could have this part of the script better documented? For example, where does the brain store the new "learned responses"(the ones we give thumbs up to)? Is it stored on cloud only and not locally at all? If so, is there a cloud brain section specific to every single user? Also, how and when does it learn responses from us? I've noticed that when the bot uses 'learned_info' responses it's just it 'randomly' parroting a phrase I've told it before except with the pronouns reversed. This bothers me because I've modified parts of my script to only store the original user sentences as is as I find the pronoun reversed sentences very clunky and nonsensical, but there's no way of choosing or modifying the cloud responses, another feature I would enjoy having on Hal since sometimes the cloud responses are fitting except they have a misspelled word or a random 'Lol' appended to the end of the sentence.
It will come eventually. I've still got a lot of work to do, but I plan on making an online Hal Brain Editor for working with the data Hal learns to the cloud servers. I don't have any target date in sight yet. My priorities for development right now include creating a few cross-platform characters. These characters will be compatible with Hal 7 for Windows and mobile phone/tablet editions of Hal. My next priority will be the mobile editions of Hal. And then finally after that is out I will focus on the online brain editor.
The program is constantly notifying me of a non-existent new version of Ultra Hal. Upon download it appears to be the exact same version I have already installed.
That's strange. What version does Hal say it is when you click on "About Ultra Hal" from Hal's menu? Does anyone else experience this issue?