Innovative IM bots

There are plenty of IM bots out on the internet. Here's a list of AIM bots, and of MSN bots (click on "Intelligent chat bots" on the left). Most are pretty straight forward, with small games and simple Eliza-style jabber. Although I personally don't like bots that try to emulate a real person very much (I don't think it works and they end up annoying, and they just plain aren't innovative), apparently alot of other people do. Here's the funniest one of those I've seen.

Every now and then I hear of a truly useful and cool one. I'm the author of a project that makes it easy to build functional bots, so from time to time I'll hear of someone using it in ways I never considered. What follows are some that I've heard of (some of the names are not included as they are meant to be stay private).

In line with the main theme of this blog, oraclelarrybot (on AIM), constructed by Chritopher Whitely, gives explanations and information about Oracle error codes. In his words:

His account name is oraclelarrybot and can accept the this commands: /help and /error. Here is an error example. /ERROR ORA-00600

Then, I've been told of some neat uses for public facing bots.. such as in Sweden a hacked version of the IM Broadcast app is used to send out announcements of spontaneous Raves. Several games have been put up, including a clever version of hangman in portuguese on MSN (wish I could remember the address!). Just yesterday I learned that a Dutch site, Roadside.info, is using a bot to deliver the latest list of speedtraps in Holland over MSN (they were already using SMS). It's a very busy bot. Also, the RSS feed-to-IM app piece is floating around in a number of places.

The Enterprise space is where nearly all the VC money is right now for bots. Companies like Conversagent have settled into a comfortable space, making bots for help desks and HR information. On the cutting-edge, I already mentioned SPSS is experimenting using IM in their MSurveys suite of products. I personally made a small ATM finder for the Bank I worked at last, which I thought was cool, but it didn't generate any interest at the time. Internal to organizations I've heard of a number of cool apps... A small delivery company used the bot, integrated with SMS through Mobile MSN, to inform drivers of new pickups when they were out automatically. A college in Nebraska uses it in their PM department to inform employees when status reports or deliverables are due on projects. And one of the coolest I've heard of, a guy made an AIM bot for his office that had menus for all the local restaurants. Around lunch time, the bot would prompt everyone in the office to vote for their preference that day, and then would randomly pick someone to go make the orders and run to get them.

Lastly, the closest thing I've seen to a killer app... this bot integrates with a blog comment system. Essentially, if you comment on a post, it will tell you, by IM, when someone comments after you. To post another comment, just reply to the IM session. Easy, and uses the power of IM to leverage the blog. You can surf away from the page and not lose the conversation. Cool!