Bot News
LeknorChat

By Brian Proffitt

In a world where automated voice mail and customer service is done with more computers than people, isn't it nice to know that the person you are chatting with on IM may not be a real person after all?

Bots on IM are nothing new, of course, but LeknorChat is one of the most sophisticated I have seen in a while.

LeknorChat got its start, appropriately, on April 1, 1998, when it was a Java program designed to act like the original chat bot Eliza. The results, also predictably, were one smug bot and one frustrated human.

Today, version 3 of LeknorChat is based on the Alice bot, which Leknor, the programmer, feels is "less dumb." It is still in Java, despite version 2's run in Perl.

To see LeknorChat in action, the documentation indicates you simply invite it into a chat room. Leknor contacted BotSpot with a correction to this.

"That won't work because an AIM limit is it can only be in three chat rooms and it is invited into three the moment it signs on," Leknor explained.

"For best results, people that talk to it should use the new AIM clients.. .and use the IM Image feature which is sometimes called Direct Connection," he continued.