After I released the “Buss oracle” MSN bot I’ve gotten some great feedback, both from end users and other .NET developers. I’ve also posted an article up on msstudent.no on how to use the DotMSN library to build your own bot. I know some of the readers of my blog are interested in this topic, so this should be some very interesting news.

Conversagent, the company behind the Encarta MSN bot implementation is making their BuddyScript SDK available for free download for anyone who wants to try to build a bot or activity application. The free download offer is valid for at least 6 months, starting January 29, 2006. The limitation of bots built using this SDK is 50 000 sessions per month. If you’re building something really popular that requires more sessions they can evaluate your bots on a case by case basis and remove the limitations. The bot itself is hosted by Conversagent on one of their servers.

The website says nothing about what will happen after the 6 month period, if this will be made available for free on a permanent basis, or if it will be made available as an commercial product. There is allso a forum post written by MSN Product Manager Todd Biggs avilable at the Messenger API forum at MSDN.

I haven’t had time to download and check out the SDK my self yet, but I figured I had to get this post out there. Thanks to Jan Kristian for mentioning this. If you want an example of what you could possible build, just check out the Encarta bot by adding encarta@conversagent.com to your contact list in MSN Messenger.

I’ll keep you posted as I find out more about this SDK and what you can do with it!

I’ve finally published my article on how to write a Messenger robot. The article is in Norwegian and is published on the Microsoft Student Community Website under out own “Coding4Fun” section.

All feedback is appreciated.

About a week ago i released my MSN bot accessing a “bus oracle” set up by the bus company in Trondheim. It’s a service that lets you ask bus schedule questions using “natural language”. Tonight the bot got its user number 200! The cool thing is that i told 15 people about the bot and then the rumour started spreading! Wonder how long it will take to get 500 users..?

I’m currently working on a few updates, one of them being user specific variables. Like, “home”, “school”, “girl friend” etc, which will allow the users to ask questions like; “when does the next bus from home to school leave?”.

Being as passioned about computers and technologies as me, I figured it was about time I jumped the blog wagon. This is my first post, and it’s about my latest project; two MSN bots.

 This summer I came across a nice little .NET library wrapping the MSN Messenger protocol, but I haven’t had time to check it out until now. The library is called DotMSN and the compiled assembly, documentation and source code can be downloaded from http://www.xihsolutions.net/dotmsn/. The library is quite straight forward, you create a new Messenger object, set your credentials, connect to the name server, and start responding to events, such as conversation created, contact added etc. I’ll probably write an article about how to use the library later on.

 At the moment I’ve got two bots up and running, offering a really nifty little service. In Trondheim, the company offering bus service has a nice web application where you can ask about bus routes using natural language. The language interpretation is written by one of the professors in artificial intelligence at the local university, so it’s actually quite good. You can ask the “Bus Oracle” questions such as “When does the next buss from A to B leave, after 16.00 Saturday”. I’m using screen scrapping to access the web page offering this service, and the MSN bot acts as a gateway between messenger and the bus oracle. To access the bot, simply add bussorakel@hotmail.com to your messenger contact list.

 I’ve also wrapped the equivalent service in Oslo, called Trafikanten. Its understanding of natural language isn’t as good as the bus oracle, but you can ask questions like “From A to B”. To access the bot, simply add trafikanten@hotmail.com to your messenger contact list.

 Both bots accept the command “!hjelp” which will show you a list of available commands. Comments and suggestions are appreciated.