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 background about all bot scripts here: