AIM Bots: To my surprise, they seem to work
When AOL first added the ‘AIM bots’ to my account, I received the intro IMs via Gaim and dismissed them as another purile attempt by AOL to monetize their IM service.
However, in the interest of keeping an open mind, I played briefly with the MovieFone bot, which as the name implies is primarily concerned with providing movie showtimes. I sent it an IM with the name of a movie and my town, not sure what to expect. This woke it up, and it sent back instructions, with a few options, including sending a title/actor/whatever or typing ‘menu’ for a..erm..menu. I fired off a movie title, and immediately got back a message prompting for a zip code; following that was a crudely rendered table of theaters and showtimes, with the option to type the number next to the theater for all showtimes at that theater.
It actually reminded me of interacting with an IVR system on the phone, except way faster. I was rather shocked to go from nothing to local showtimes in a few seconds; that’s about how long it takes to load the ads on movietickets.com or even moviefone.
So, I wonder what other compelling services could be composed using the chatbot interface idiom….