Visichat

Chat robot is the first commercial plugin for Visichat 3 and above. It's been a long-anticipated addition to what was an already successful video chat package, made possible by the new application framework in the 3.0 release. This automated messenger can parse public and private chat for its name and a query, giving the best answer it can, as set by the flash chat owner in the bot's knowledge base through the control panel. The chat bot can look for one or more keywords in various combinations in its knowledge base to establish an appropriate line to say.

The plugin can be further enhanced by a connection to your community database to provide more information. For example, imagine you had a question like 'What's there to do in here?' directed to the chat bot. The robot can answer with a predefined line like 'Chat, play games and plenty more...' or pull your chat's info summary from the database, saving you time when dealing with frequently asked questions and other simple queries on your chat website.

The chat bot can be moved between different rooms. There is a one minute delay between each bot enable or disable action too, so your robot will appear to naturally log in and out of rooms - just like a normal video chat user would. Our chat robot is very polite. It can be set to greet newcomers to the chatroom after they log in for the first time. The greeting message can be customised and will include the visitor's name. The robot also won't issue a welcome greeting to the same user twice on the same day.

Don't want the chat robot to have guest level privileges? No problem! You can create a user account and assign it to the robot via the 'Username' field through the control panel. The chat bot can then be moved into a custom user group with special permissions to suit your needs. This capability enables you to change the bot's profile information, avatar picture and icon.

The bot can be configured with an RSS feed of your choosing for regular chat updates. Your community site news, financials, stocks, government, and academic syndications are at your fingertips. Chat Robot is clever enough to request, rotate and refresh the feed by itself. It will post the news items at regular intervals whilst checking if there is more recent information available at the source for your flash chat. The post interval is controllable. Active traders will appreciate the ability to swap out feeds on the fly and get rapid updates from a broad spectrum of standard services.

By default, Chat Robot acts like a regular guest user. If it is spoken to, it will answer back. If not, it will remain quiet, allowing your other chatters to converse as normal. It can be kicked, silenced and time-banned. The chat bot can get involved in private messaging, if allowed by the webmaster. In this case, the level of functionality is identical to public chat. Having robot assisted private messaging can extend the reach of your interactive help system or automated moderation. It can also entertain chatters who may be waiting for their conversation partner to respond too!

Need a hint? Chat Robot can pull up some intriguing Wikipedia entries on topics of general interest. It will present summaries for keywords or phrases in public or private chat for your information, and will helpfully include a link to further reading. Never lose a quiz or a chat debate again - simply ask the bot, and it will help!

Wikipedia lookup supports multiple languages. If your flash chat language is set to something other than English, than all Wiki questions to the bot will go to your localised version of the encyclopedia. Pretty neat. But the clever bot won't stop there. If an article does not exist in your language on Wikipedia, it will still try to return the most relevant English entry. Of course, to take advantage of this Chat Robot enhancement, Wikipedia must have at least one entry in your local language. 

Starting a private chat with a bot is no diffent from private messaging a user in video chat, so your members can get started immediately. The plugin is very easy to use. The chat robot plugin is already available to try in the demo, accessible from the Visichat product page. This add-on is available with chat plans for 50 or more users.