Ever wish you could run a quick errand during a conversation without the other party noticing you've gone away? Ever wanted to create the illusion that you've been sitting in front of your computer all day long? Perhaps you'd just like to freak out your friends or co-workers? All noble causes for sure. Whatever your reasons may be, running a chat bot is always a good laugh and a great way to experiment with instant messaging protocols.
A chat bot or chatter robot is a computer program that tries to have an intelligent conversation with a human by analyzing the input text received from a human and replying with output text that hopefully makes sense to humans.
These applications are one of the classic topics of artificial intelligence and the famous Turing Test. To create a convincing chat bot from scratch is far outside the scope of this book. Instead, we will create an interface between three great existing chat bots and a few popular chat services.