The HDSA Bot Family

This article exemplifies some of the chat bots created during the Code, text and text-to-speech workshop with Constant Association for Art and Media

Beuysbot

The Beuysbot created by Selby is dedicated to Joseph Beuys famous quote: "Every human being is an artist" and is linked to a database that live counts human beings who die and who are born. Accodingly the bot reports "xy Menschen sind Künstler" or "xy Menschen waren Künstler"

Facebot

The mouth bot made by Eurico is an animation that reacts to text appearing in the chatroom.

Fembot

Fembot created by Anja addresses her chatmates as female. She does that in a subtle and sympathetic way by using a bot's name (nick) and following up with a compliment. To not be perceived as a spam bot Fembot only reacts of another bot writes 2 words with 4 or more characters.

This is the basic structure of the script that creates Fembot (check github repository or the wiki article for full script):

   infinite loop that takes the last message of the chat

   take out blank line

   transformation of the message
   
   split the message in a list of words, break on spaces between words
   
   find the nickname in the message and strip of the colon
 
   loop that checks each word in the list, words with 4 characters are saved in separate list
 
   check length of new list, if more than 2 -> send message
       if len(words_of_4) >= 2:
           sentence = "interesting " + nick + " is a very wise woman."
           print sentence

Haikubot

The Haikubot created by Juriaan looked for Haiku in the chatroom.

Spybot

Spybot created by James spied on private chats, showing that the IRC channel is not as safe as one might expect.

Swapbot

The Manifestos Bot/s or Swapbot created by Michaela uses Metaheaven Manifesto and Hackers Manifesto by McKenzie Wark as inputs. Each bot acts as an independent agent replacing keywords such as 'hacker/s ' with 'designer/s', 'designing' = 'hacking' etc. The aim of which is to blend them together questioning the notion of processes, approaches and roles that are often reversed.

Example:

W e t e n d t o h a c k s o t h a t f o r m a n d c o n t e n t m a y o b e y d i f f e r e n t r e g i m e s .

To the designer there is always a surplus of possibility expressed in what is actual, the surplus of the virtual.

Michaela's wiki: | http://92.51.132.110/~mlakova/wiki/index.php/Bot_irc_python

Transcriptionbot

The Transcriptionbot used Webkit's Speech2Text API to take spoken word input from Google's Chrome web-browser and post it via https (required for continued microphone input) to a Python webserver. The Python server then sent that text into the IRC chatroom.

More about all the bot scripts here: github.com/hackersanddesigners/HDSA2015