there’s a semi-interesting thread on metafilter regarding The Googlematic AIMBOT in particular and “chat agents” in general.
my 2 cents? jabber + alice with a little help from the artificial intelligence mark-up languge for providing roster bots with a narrowly defined knowledgebase could be interesting:
“AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) is an XML-compliant language that’s easy to learn, and makes it possible for you to begin customizing an Alicebot or creating one from scratch within minutes.”
“The standard A.L.I.C.E. distribution includes a knowledge base of approximately 30,000 categories. Here’s an example of one of them:
<category>
<pattern>WHAT ARE YOU</pattern>
<template>
<think><set_topic>Me</set_topic></think>
I am the latest result in artificial intelligence,
which can reproduce the capabilities of the human brain
with greater speed and accuracy.
</template>
</category>”