Encarta Bot!

I was listening to an ArCast podcast with guest Simon Guest (not a pun) and near the end of the talk they brought up IM bots.  IM bots are like the old IRC bots, which means they are just scripted IM clients.  They understand certain phrases and questions and can provide information. 

An example of an IM bot is the Encarta Bot.  You can check it out by adding encarta@conversagent.com to your MSN IM list.  When you open a conversation window with it some text pops up to tell you what it can do.  You can then ask it all sorts of questions.  Some of its answers assumes you have Encarta on the box and will attempt to open it up to show you more information.  I think this is great for students and kids wanting to learn things.

The ArCast episode was talking about this type of technology in the enterprise as it pertains to user interfaces.  For example, an IM address that people can hit with the question, “what were the sales numbers for June?”, or, “What is the next company holiday?".  The bot could answer the question outright, or maybe it just sends a link to some search results on the intranet.  Another example given was a system that could IM you to tell you there is an invoice waiting for your signature, to which you could respond with “sign it”, or perhaps, “who is the invoice for?”, or “show me the purchase order.”, etc.  Pretty cool idea to have the system contacting you in real time rather than just an email.