Chat bots developed to handle small talk with friends

Sometimes you need to be productive, but your friends are less preoccupied and insist on chatting via a messenging service. Chatbots may soon come to the rescue so that you can keep working without alienating your friends.

The Chat Bot Club, designed as part of the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, lets you create a bot of yourself to interact with your friends so you don’t have to. It will learn your style of writing and interaction, so it’ll get to grips with frequently used phrases and what emojis you like to use. It’ll seem like you’re paying attention, even though this couldn’t be further from the truth. Of course, using such a bot could easily backfire on you later if you don’t scroll back through the log.

Creator Irene Chang plans to integrate APIs and add support for WeChat, WhatsApp, Kik and Facebook Messenger among others. She came up with the idea after being overwhelmed by group chats with friends on Facebook Messenger.