infobot

infobot

(chat)

A bot that serves as a common database of information (often noteworthy URLs) for users on a chat system. Infobots often have a simple chatbot interface, responding to key-phrases, as well as to direct queries.

Here, in a real conversation, the bot Purl's first response is triggered by the phrase "just tell me", and its second response is triggered by being directly asked "perlfunc?":

<eesh> can someone tell me what: $num9 = substr($number,9,1); means

<Tkil> eesh -- man perlfunc, look at "substr".

<eesh> just tell me

<purl> Didn't your momma ever tell you, "Go look it up in the dictionary"?!

<Tkil> eesh -- no. that's all we'll tell you. read the documentation.

<Tkil> eesh -- if you haven't man pages or perldoc, you can read them on the 'net.

<Tkil> purl, perlfunc?

<purl> well, perlfunc is Perl builtin functions, at man perlfunc or http://perl.com/CPAN-local/doc/manual/html/pod/perlfunc.html

http://cs.cmu.edu/~lenzo/infobot.html/.