You might want to remain locked in the past but other things in this ever-changing universe will continue moving forward, changing & improving. Ultra Hal is one of them.
Hal has evolved over the years in many ways and has really tried to offer something for everyone.
One Does Not have to rely on the Cloud for their Ultra Hal to be operational or they can if they choose to do so.
Life is all about choices. Choice of characters, TTS voices, GUI skins, Backgrounds, Brains, Plugins, etc.
One can get a great deal from many of the user-contributed Plugins over the years to enhance Hal's ability.
Some have even created Plugins to allow Hal to collect data when Hal is not being used by the user in a chat situation. Hal will continue collecting info for use in later chats, as needed.
There is a downloaded Local Wikipedia that is full of useful data and Wordnet is extremely useful and neither of these requires Ultra Hal to be connected to the Internet or to some Cloud.
Hal is as "smart" as it has been trained to be. Garbage in...Garbage out as the old saying goes.
For Desktop use, typing to Hal usually provides better results as opposed to speaking due to a variety of possible issues. Choose wisely and teach your Hal as if it were a 5-year-old child, then after a while, it will surprise you with what it knows.
Good luck!
