Consciousnet

Consciousnet is an old Perl chatbot experiment built around a modified Chatbot::Eliza script and internet snippets.

Reference paper: V. Catania, S. Monteleone, M. Palesi, and D. Patti, "Impact of Users' Beliefs in Text-Based Linguistic Interaction," IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 46861-46867, 2020, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2978977 (IEEE Xplore).

Current status

The old Google Programmable Search / Custom Search setup is deprecated and is no longer part of the current branch. The exact pre-modernization version is preserved as the Git tag legacy-2026-04-29.

The current branch is intentionally simple: it sends a string to Brave Search API and uses returned web snippets as NET responses.

Install on macOS or Ubuntu Linux

Clone the project:

git clone https://github.com/davidepatti/consciousnet
cd consciousnet

Run setup:

./setup.sh

The setup script:

• checks Perl and required HTTP/JSON/SSL modules
• installs missing HTTP/SSL modules on Ubuntu with apt-get, or locally under local/ with CPAN on macOS and other systems
• copies the repository's modified Eliza.pm into local/Chatbot/Eliza.pm instead of replacing a system Perl module
• creates consciousnet.conf from consciousnet.conf.example
• creates logs/ for session logs
• runs a Perl syntax check

consciousnet.conf is ignored by Git and should not be committed.

Configure Brave Search

Use the Brave Search API key you already have. Put it in consciousnet.conf:

brave_api_key=YOUR_BRAVE_SEARCH_API_KEY
brave_endpoint=https://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/web/search
brave_country=us
brave_search_lang=en
brave_ui_lang=en-US
brave_safesearch=off
brave_spellcheck=1
meta_file=annette.meta
max_answer_words=25
page_size=5
http_timeout=10

meta_file points to the Eliza meta script. Relative paths are resolved from the project directory. To use the Italian conversation script, set it to gioio-ita.meta in your private consciousnet.conf.

max_answer_words rejects overlong candidate web-search answers before one is selected. Answers are not truncated. Search snippets are first reduced to one complete sentence.

An Italian example config is available at consciousnet-it.conf.example; it uses gioio-ita.meta and Italian Brave Search settings.

Or keep the key out of the file:

export BRAVE_SEARCH_API_KEY=YOUR_BRAVE_SEARCH_API_KEY

Useful Brave docs:

• Brave Search API
• Brave API authentication

Run

Start Consciousnet:

./docgioio

For faster local testing:

./docgioio --quick

Debug logging is opt-in:

./docgioio --quick --debug

Then type a query-like prompt, for example:

who is davide

You should see:

DEBUG: Brave Search query: ...

For an offline smoke test without network calls:

./docgioio --quick --no-net

If Perl reports Can't verify SSL peers without knowing which Certificate Authorities to trust, rerun ./setup.sh. The setup script installs Mozilla::CA, and entity.pl uses it automatically for HTTPS verification.

To use a different credential file:

./docgioio --config=/path/to/consciousnet.conf

or:

CONSCIOUSNET_CONFIG=/path/to/consciousnet.conf ./docgioio

Old Google Version

The previous README and Google-based installation flow are explicitly deprecated, but remain available for old users and old virtual machines at:

legacy-2026-04-29 README

To check out the old version:

git clone https://github.com/davidepatti/consciousnet
cd consciousnet
git checkout legacy-2026-04-29

Then follow the README from that tagged version. That old flow expects Data.pm, old Google Custom Search credentials, CPAN Chatbot::Eliza, and manual replacement of the installed Eliza.pm. It is preserved only so existing users can reproduce the historical behavior.