Tillybot is a utility bot on Twitter. You can give her commands and she’ll reply to them.
At the moment she can fetch the weather, compare Last.fm users, geocode your address to latitude and longitude coordinates and fight against other people on Twitter! #fight
Robots have always fascinated me and my first robot-like thing must have been Lego and later ‘Technical’ Lego, with little engines and train rails. Skip ahead a few years and then there’s IRC, I was using mIRC to get onto servers and communicating with the ‘bots’ such as NickServ.
So it didn’t take long before I started to make my own IRC bots. I wasn’t good with all that shell stuff, so I just opened 2 clients, one where I would run my bot and one where I would test it.
Now skip ahead again and I’m having a lot of fun with API’s, one of which is obviously Twitter. Now I had the idea for a while, but a couple weeks ago I ‘discovered’ the “entities” in the results that Twitter gives you. They parse hashtags for you, time to get started!
So I created a ‘utility bot’, I wanted to call her uTilly, but it was already taken, so then the name Tillybot was created. Luckily the .com was available as well ;)
If you’re wondering what a utility bot is, it’s basically like a utility knife; one entity with a lot of functions.
At the moment Tilly only replies to commands/hashtags, but I intend to make her a bit more ‘human’, so you could have ‘real’ conversations. For now the commands work fine.
At the time of writing she knows the following commands:
- #bmi – Will calculate your Body Mass Index
- #fight – Will ‘fight’ another person on Twitter
- #followme – Will make her follow your Twitter account
- #geo – Turns addresses/locations into geo coordinates
- #lastfm – Compares two Last.fm users
- #weather – Gives you the weather for the provided location
Most of these commands require ‘parameters’ so for a complete list and explanation just check our her website: http://www.tillybot.com
Tillybot.com
This is only just the beginning and there’s still a lot of things to make/do. So if you know any cool commands or know a neat API that Tilly should use as well, let me know in the comments!
P.s. If you want to fight me tell her this: @Tillybot #fight #gerbenjacobs
