
Twitter bots are nothing new, but Dear Assistant is unique. It leverages Wolfram Alpha, the โanswer engineโ from Wolfram Research, to answer your questions on the social network.
We first stumbled on Dear Assistant by chance earlier this morning. A quick check through its tweets, which include answers to word meanings, weather conditions, language translation, time zone conversions, date calculations, led us to this gem:
@yourcombine Who created you? | I was created by Stephen Wolfram and his team.Why? | Because.
โ Dear Assistant (@DearAssistant) March 8, 2013
As far as we could tell, this wasnโt built by Wolfram Alpha, but the answers certainly lined up. We asked Amit Agarwal, the botโs creator, if our guess was correct.
โYou got that right,โ Agarwal told TNW in an email. โThe bot is getting the answers through Wolfram. I have open sourced the bot so anyone can build upon it. The unique thing is that it is running as a Google Script inside Google Drive.โ
Agarwal calls his creation โa mini version of Siriโ which actually isnโt too far off given that Siri also leverages Wolfram Alpha. Furthermore, he explains you can quickly recreate it yourself:
Writing a Twitter bot is surprisingly simple and you can get one up and running in 5 minutes. It helps if you know little bit of coding (simple JavaScript) but thatโs certainly not a requirement for writing a basic Twitter bot.
For full instructions on how to write your own Twitter bot, check out Agarwalโs instructions here. The source code is available here.
For more such news, you can follow our Twitter-specific account here and follow me here.
See also โ Twitterโs API keys and secrets for its official apps surface; what should we do with them? and Twitter kills TweetDeck for iPhone, Android and AIR, drops Facebook integration, Mac and PC versions live on
Image credit: Iva Villi
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