Rick Gee turned me on to this. There was a story today on NPR about bots that interact with people over IM. If you go to Active Buddy, you can interact with some of their bots. They are essentially Eliza programs with a better database, or at least that's what it seems. eBay apparently uses one for FAQs. All in all, a pretty clever use of IM, in my book.
A few questions:
- Does anyone know if there's a IM interface to Ask Jeeves? I couldn't find one on their site. Seem like a natural.
- I don't see (with a quick look) any similar development efforts for Jabber. Does anyone have pointers to something like this for Jabber?
This seems like it would be pretty easy to put together for utah.gov as a FAQs, for kids to ask questions on homework, etc.
