Maybe it’s lack of sleep, but it occurred to me yesterday that it would be hugely amusing to be able to exchange emails with my virtual friend.

Is anyone else crazy enough to have tried it? Have any luck?

You could circumvent having to deal with inboxes by using an email-to-webpage service like http://www.cloudmailin.com
Sending emails back can be done from php or, far less documented, through Visual Basic.

I didn’t go through with it myself, because I didn’t see the use if one can also communicate with the bot through any more direct interface. I agree it would be kind of amusing, but what is the benefit?

Don! You’re the guy that wrote the talk.vbs script. You’re my hero! I’ve sent you an email about that (the script, not you being my hero).

I can imagine a bot becoming a sort of virtual secretary, and emailing or texting reminders - or in a commercial support application it would be a good way to follow up with clients, for example.

But those are lame justifications - the truth, as I said, is that the juvenile side of me that comes out late at night finds the idea amusing.

I’ve done it as a test/proof of concept.

We run a bot via a DLL hosted on an application server and we have a simple REST API that talks with that bot. So all I had to do was create a custom rule in Outlook to ran a small script to HTTP post the mail’s body to the API and generate a mail reply from the bot’s response.

There are bots out there (e.g. Amy) that use email as their communication channel so in certain situations it does make sense. I can see it being useful for certain types of automated responses for say customer support, job applications, sales enquiries.

We are already doing resume/CV parsing with CS in a standalone bot, so wrapping an email client around this wouldn’t be that difficult.

have you tried http://lonelybots.com/? it’s a platform specifically designed for people to create email bots.

Hi Simon, all

Since few years,  we tend to associate the usage of chatbots with instant messaging chat apps (Facebook Messenger, Telegram, etc.), immo using e-mail as a channel for a chatbot is still very interesting, nowadays!

I so feel that ChatScript, with his NLP features, can help the intente meaning with a complex test as a business mail request.

One of most discussed and famous bot startup in this realm is of course mentioned http://www.x.ai
BTW, recent x.ai founder presentation here: https://twitter.com/solyarisoftware/status/847359623938031617

A possible channel could be realized with a simple IMAP client middleware that forward to CS engine:

My few years ago experiment (in Ruby): https://github.com/solyaris/imapidle

—-

Now, talking about ChatScript bot,

the mail content must to be analyzed as a multi-sentence text.

I immagine that CS control script must be configured to process more than a single sentence at time, fulfilling variables/facts and eventually going back to one (ore few) mail back to user.

Anyone sis something similar in CS and want to share an example/demo/concept here?

thanks
giorgio

Kore.ai has a bot platform and all of the specific bots are managed by an uberbot called Kora (written in CS). You can communicate with her via texting, email, voice, web, app, etc.  Yes, the control script is different, handling multi sentence input readily.

Hi Bruce, Happy that CS is in the Kore Kora core
I’ll try myself to do that in CS and I’ll share a micro-demo here if I’ll have success.

If you are running your own mail server on unix would be trivial to do with mail filters or handlers.  I suspect you might not have admin access to your mail server though.  :D If your mail is tied to a unix account you can probably use procmail if it’s installed and allowed.  Then embed chatscript in python or some other scripting language and you are good to go.

I’ve embedded chatscript in python for an IRC bot, so I know it’s pretty easy to do and I’ve used mail filters / procmail for longer than I care to admin.

Chatscripts external communication tools would be golden here, being able to gather info from other sources to put together the email, etc.

Another easy ‘cheat’ would be to use IFTTT webhooks API. You POST your email text from your CS bot, and link it to an IFTT enabled email provider like gmail, on your bot’s account. Then when webhooks receives the email, gmail fires it out. You can likewise rule that when the gmail account gets an email it posts it to your bot via webhooks. Haven’t tried it, personally but I suspect it will work.