Right now, your matchtext is: how are you

If it is anything else, even just one character different, it will not match. That means that just adding punctuation (a question mark in this case) will make it fail to match.

You can change the matchtext to: how are you*

That would match anything that starts out with "how are you" regardless of any other text or characters following it. So it would match things like "how are you" and "how are you?" and "how are you, man?" and whatever else. It will not match text with something before it, such as "hey, how are you?" For that, you'd need a * before it as well... matchtext would be: *how are you*

In the event, it would look like:

Code:
on *:text:how are you*:#: { }


Or:

Code:
on *:text:*how are you*:#: { }


You can change the wildcards any way you want to get the results you are looking for.