Keepon , the bot that bounces to the rhythm! "[It] is a small creature-like robot with a soft rubber skin, two cameras in its eyes, and a microphone in its nose. Keepon is designed to interact with children by communicating attention and emotion. It has four degrees of freedom: attention is directed by turning +/-180° and nodding +/-40°, while emotion is expressed by rocking side-to-side +/-25° and bobbing up to 15mm:"
posted on Aug 22, 2007 - View this thread

Meet George -- 39, single, quirky sense of humour, looking for friends to chat with online. Last year, he won the Loebner Prize, to bots who can most successfully pass the Turing Test. More here from BBC. How long before we have our own Mefibots?
posted on Sep 16, 2006 - View this thread

Sternest Meanings: A fancy schmancy bot that takes what you say and returns a darn good anagram. "Shaky catacombs enchant fatty. Anyway thunderous star. Roman and ga-ga road." My conversations with bots always end up with me cussing and/or crying.
posted on May 28, 2006 - View this thread

"Imagine this: a digital butler that roams the Internet, intuitively knowing your likes and dislikes, retrieving perfect strands of news and information that you never would have discovered through old-fashioned surfing." There's RumorBot and the Iliad fetchbot (perfect for bot newbies), or you can try your hand at writing your own in php using this as a tutorial, or if you prefer, C++ or Perl.
posted on Mar 16, 2006 - View this thread

"To tell the truth ... I'm sorta surprised they haven't caught me yet," The Washington Post ran an interesting interview with a botmaster, a young man who made serveral thousands of dollars a month installing XXX spyware on machines that he controlled. He installed the software on the machines of people he did not know by hacking into them remotely. The lenghty article included a partial photo of the botmaster along with vauge descriptions of the small midwestern town where the man lives, and was published with the understanding that the man's identity would be kept secret. Someone should have told that to the person that manages photos at the Washington Post. An estute reader over at Slashdot was able to locate some extra information stored in the picture's metadata including the photographer and the location the picture was taken, Roland, Oklahoma, a town of less than 3000 people. Whoops.
posted on Feb 21, 2006 - View this thread

GuitarBot
"In designing GuitarBot, our goal was to create an electrified slide guitar that was versatile, responsive, capable of fast and slow playing, easy to control, with high-quality sound, modular and portable. We also wanted to extend, not simply duplicate, the capabilities of a human guitarist."

Don't miss the video [16 meg Quicktime]. Brought to you by the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots.
posted on Dec 1, 2004 - View this thread

Are bluffing bots outplaying human poker players online? They might not be as strong as Vex Bot, but they could spell trouble for the booming online-poker industry.
posted on Sep 21, 2004 - View this thread

Iraqfilter. "Sometime between April 2003 and October 2003, someone at the White House added virtually all of the directories with 'Iraq' in them to its robots.txt file, meaning that search engines would no longer list those pages in results or archive them." The robots.txt file is here. And here's the Slashdot discussion. I guess it's hard to restore integrity to the Presidency when people can compare your statements over time.
posted on Oct 27, 2003 - View this thread

Blog Change Bot is an AOL Instant Messenger-based bot that will send you an IM whenever your favorite blogs are updated. (via Blogroots; more inside)
posted on Jul 26, 2003 - View this thread

Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer are fighting, again. It started over a remark Dave made about various blogging services. Mark turned around and created a bot that reads Dave's RSS feed every 5 minutes and spits out the text, annotated to show what's been added/deleted/changed since the last time it ran. Dave's claiming copyright infringement, Mark's claiming fair use. Okay MeFi folks, which side are you on, and why?
posted on Jul 11, 2003 - View this thread

Can Optimus Prime be far behind? Xerox PARC's experimental, modular robots look like nothing so much as a pile of random MECCANO--until you see them in action. Watch one robot transform from a loop, to a snake, to a spider configuration! Or play with the Java simulator. [via Boing Boing]
posted on Jun 22, 2003 - View this thread

The Personality Forge. Create an AI bot, and set it loose.
posted on May 16, 2003 - View this thread

Is Grub out of control? Barely more than a week old, the distributed search engine is already causing headaches. It does not properly follow the Robot Exclusion Standard and thus spiders sites against their owners' wishes. Because it is a distributed client run by thousands of volunteers (and therefore connects from many different IP addresses), it is non-trivial to block. The Wikipedia project, for example, is experiencing slowdowns because of it. Let's hope they can solve these problems, as the idea seems to be quite cool.
posted on Apr 23, 2003 - View this thread

SBC Customer Service staffed by bots? The bots themselves don't bother me too much, I think its pretty cool if SBC Yahoo has bots advanced enough that they can use them for online customer service and the bots turn out to be actually helpful (I don't know, since I never have problems with my DSL and have never used them). What is disturbing, though, is the apparent deceit involved by having that the bots insist on being human. Anyone know anything more?
posted on Feb 19, 2003 - View this thread

Pandorabots is a new site for building and hosting chat bots (HTML, not AIM) based on the Alicebot engine. They even have fee-based access to a bot. Interesting. I want to find out more about you.
posted on Feb 14, 2003 - View this thread

An interesting idea Create your own bot... Sounds like an interesting service. What do you think?
posted on Jul 17, 2002 - View this thread

The bad news: SmarterChild, one of the first instant message bot applications, is dead. The good news: ActiveBuddy, the folks that created SmarterChild, will be releasing a toolset to create new bots.
posted on Jun 30, 2002 - View this thread

BotFighters: BotFighters is a brand new type of action game. The mission of the game is to track down and battle with other players, but in BotFighters, the real world is the game arena. You have to move yourself physically close enough to be able to hit. The game concept is similar to "Gotcha!", or virtual paintball. Your mobile phone is used as a weapon and a radar device to track down opponents. When playing, you can at all times be attacked by other players, so be careful! You play with your mobile phone by sending SMS commands to number 6688. (from play)
posted on Oct 19, 2001 - View this thread

From the googlebot FAQ: "For most sites, Googlebot should not access your site more than once every few seconds on average"

I thought it was a mistake at first, but they go on to say that you should contact them if "we are placing too high a load on your site" Do they really hit some sites that hard? If so, is it really necessary?
posted on Jun 5, 2001 - View this thread

InfoBots are coming. I believe we've touched on this before, but now it seems to be moving from concept to reality: Instant Messenger "buddies" that are actually bots. You send them an IM with a question, such as "Hey pal, what's the weather in Thunder Bay, Ontario?" And it IMs you back with the answer, almost instantaneously. No waiting for messy web sites to load, no funky searches to run. ActiveBuddy has been the most, um, active in developing the technology, but they've been working on it forever without anything to show to the public. Now, it's out there, somewhere. CNET is reporting today that an ActiveBuddy beta bot has been live for a few months; you can play with it right now if you know its name. (And if you do know its name, a tip would be appreciated. I've been jonesing for this for a good while.) A more public version is supposed to be out in a few weeks. Here buddy buddy buddy...
posted on Apr 25, 2001 - View this thread

AOL + Eliza = AOLiza Some amusing AOL IM conversations using the old Eliza program. Via Yuppie Slayer
posted on Aug 31, 2000 - View this thread

AOLiza: Funnier than a wombat on meth.
posted on Aug 19, 2000 - View this thread