I’m sure most of you AIM users noticed that when you logged in today, you had a couple new items in your buddy list under the group “AIM Bots”. I noticed it as well and, like you, my first instinct was “wtf?”. I was just about to delete them from my buddy list when my curiosity got the best of me and I opened up a chat window with MovieFone and said ‘hello’. I was greeted with:

its Rishi: hello
MovieFone: Hey there. Just ask type a film name, actor or director any time and I’ll tell you what’s playing.

I proceeded to play around with it, typing in a sequence like ‘Jarhead’, ‘94304′ and got local movie showings for the movie Jarhead. The text interface is very easy to follow and response time is minimal. If you’re an AIM user (you don’t need the AIM client, 3rdParty clients work fine) I highly recommend you check it out next time you’re looking for movie showings. You’ll save a lot of time versus having to load up the movie website of your choice and searching for the same information.

They also launched a shopping bot called ShoppingBuddy. I was somewhat less impressed by it but still it is an interesting attempt at a text-based shopping search.

The most intriguing aspect is that anyone can create their own bot relatively easily using AIM chat API’s which are available in many languages. Here’s an example of a simple Perl-based Amazon AIM Bot. This rudimentary example only accepts an ASIN as input, queries Amazon via their REST interface, and spits out product details. Given the fact that most of Amazon’s db is accessible via REST, this simple bot can easily be expanded upon.

For information like sports scores, stock quotes, traffic reports, etc. where it is straightforward to understand what information the user is asking for based on their input (’94304′ into a weather bot, ‘Yankees’ into a sports score bot, ‘GOOG’ into a stock quote bot), I think such chat bots are an efficient and convenient medium - more so than the Web.

Side Note:
One thing I have yet to try is using these AIM bots via my cell phone (all the carriers have some way to access the AIM service even if it’s just a clumsy SMS-based interface). It seems like this is an interesting alternative to “mobile search” services like 4INFO, a startup which provides information access via SMS. While services like these supposedly employ AI techniques to understand what the user is asking for, these companies plan to drive revenue thru advertising which will be delivered along with the reply message. As someone who would get ADBLOCK as my personalized license plate if it was available, I could imagine myself preferring to use advertising-free sources of information even if they were less sophisticated. Of course there are other issues facing mobile search like the fact that most carriers still charge for SMS. This fact alone has kept me using WAP as my source of mobile information. (Yes I know most carriers also charge for data access but Verizon + 3rdParty WAP gateway = free WAP for me!)