SmarterLocal
| Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 | --Sean |
Looking back on my youth, I can fondly remember the endless...minutes of fun that I had with SmarterChild, an AIM bot that would cleverly respond your messages to produce a reasonable facsimile of normal conversation, provided that your normal conversations centered around trying to get your robotic counterpart to say something vaguely inappropriate. Turing Tests had never been more amusing.
ylocalbot is not that kind of chat bot. He isn't quite as interested in how your day is going or why you feel the way you do about <blank>, but he can quickly return back Y! Local search results and directions if you're looking to cut down on how often you open up your browser. Ask him about "vietnamese in Palo Alto, CA", follow up on any of the numbered results (by replying with the number) to get directions (from the center of your search location, it looks like, which is a kind of interesting decision), and type "more" to scroll through the other options.
Or have fun with the fact that you can get him to say anything in the form "I'm sorry, but I'm unable to locate any X in Y" if your request, "X in Y", doesn't return any results. Looks like I haven't quite outgrown my SmarterChild phase...
Thanks to Michael for the heads up!