Rather than develop a custom web application, which is enormously time consuming, I’d rather have Grace be available to chat via an existing infrastructure. 

Has anyone thought of using chat via facebook for their bot to chat over? Or Google Talk API ?

Robert Medeksza has : http://www.zabaware.com/fb.html

I just added hal to my facebook.  I really like the way he has it setup to give feedback.

I put ‘I am going to New york next week’

and it said ‘since when are you going to new york next week?’

I obviously hit the “Bad Reply” button. .  but then it gave a list of responses it was also considering, one was “Ah ! is that for work?” 

Not bad at all.  I of course confirmed that WAS a good reply to pick.

I was thinking more the real time chat . . .but Hal has a real time, but it is on the page itself,  no difference, thanks I will investigate this further.

No problem

To be honest I have lost track of a lot of Ultra Hal developments lately, but I know there are a lot of plans.

One of the things he is working on is a massive central database that desktop version can hook up to.  And he has also been scanning a huge amount of Twitter conversations from which his system picks out things it considers to be quality replies.  I think that will all end up in the database too, not sure but I would have thought so.

Have fun investigating

BTW Hal can also chat over AIM, I think that is limited to the desktop version at the moment.

I managed to get my AIML chatbot Mitsuku to chat over MSN but it appears that you are limited to only 150 contacts and so I dropped it.

Awesome, any URLs you can point me to?  150 will be good enough.  I only want people interested in chatbot technology to use it, not just anybody.

I would be interested in this, as well, Steve. I may not (or may) put Morti on an IM service, but the technology may prove useful in other ways.

[edit]Morti’s already got a Facebook account, but I have yet to (nor am I likely to) “connect” him to it. I’m not a frequent visitor to FB anymore, for that matter.[/edit]

http://www.brownphp.com/2009/03/jabber-with-php-part-i-xmpphp/
http://code.blitzaffe.com/pages/phpclasses/files/jabber_client_52-11
http://www.phpclasses.org/package/3106-PHP-Event-driven-Jabber-instant-messenger-client.html

Through the Jabber-protocol you can interact with a whole host of IM-services. Jabber is of course also used natively by GoogleTalk.

Thank you, Hans Peter. I’ll give these links some scrutiny in a couple of days.

I used http://www.trillian.im/
There was a plugin for AIML bots that allowed them to talk via MSN.

Excellent, thanks for the links Steve & Hans Peter.

Victor, I posted the links in reply to Dave, so I listed some PHP-stuff. Of course there are most certainly some useful C++ libraries for Jabber floating around on the web as well. I’m sure you can find those yourself, but if you want some pointers just let me know.

Sure, if you have them handy.  A very quick few minutes of researching seemed to indicate that Facebook uses “XMPP” ??

Victor,

XMPP = Jabber

I looked for some stuff for you:

http://camaya.net/gloox/
http://delta.affinix.com/iris/
http://www.openaether.org/oajabber.html
http://swift.im/swiften/
https://github.com/silas/txmpp
http://www.lastbeatniks.tk/free-jabber-classes/c/

That should get you started nicely

XMPP=Jabber . . . Ok… I’m very new to scripting IM APIs.. . .does it show ?

wow, that’s a good set of links sir!  much appreciated.

You’re welcome