Prototypes
BBC Programmes via Jabber
This IM bot comes from a BBC member of staff Duncan Robertson...
I have been playing with ejabberd, Jabber, XMPP and the various client libraries, specifically the rather wonderfully simple Jabber::Simple and Jabber:Bot.It all started because I was doing a Fireeagle integration job with a product at work, and was getting frustrated with the fact that it is still not super simple to update my location. It struck me as I stared at my desktop, that I always have Adium running. Wouldn’t it be great if I had a Fireeagle contact that I could just tell my location, and it would go off and update, letting me know when they’re done. Now that part is midway done (post to come), but before I started that, I wanted to research more the workings of a Chatterbot, a computer program that pretends to be a human and can answer basic commands. They have been around for a long time, I remember playing with an IRC bot a while back, getting it to display the last commit messages from Subversion.
So that research turned into a BBC Programmes bot. As I worked on BBC Programmes, I have good knowledge of the site and the data within, and building a bot that integrated with that data seemed a good example of using the restful API available.
If you just want to try this thing out, here are the details of what you need to do.
- You need a Gmail or Jabber compatible IM account
- You need a Jabber enabled client, I’ve listed a few:
- You need to add a new contact: im.bbcprogrammes@gmail.com
This should be it. You should have a new contact appear in your list (They have a BBC logo as an avatar). You can now begin a conversation with this contact. It’s probably best to start with: HELP
- 03 Nov 2008 01:20 PM
