I would suggest, other thant the most needed TOP-DOWN approach,
A quick analysis of what topics 'Talbot' (talking bot... Oh my am I so creative today :p ) should be able to handle.

For example, you could put some links:
Talk to talbot about weather
Talk about music
Talk about sex
Each link should load a single interaction database and give a certain amount of key words to use in the questions, to restrict the field of action of the AI.

Then you should figure what kind of response generator you like:
Chance- based, on reasonable combinations of THE QUESTION WORDS, and combinations of ANSWER TEMPLATES with a database for WORDS in the answer!
Pattern- based, pattern matching the question (for syntax) and offering a TEMPLATE ANSWER, with words from the database.

Hope this helped... but I'm sure it did :)