V1.5 (1.5.2) - News

* Press the new "Try" button to open a (rather nice looking) chat window to chat with "Crazy" yourself. The only difference to the robot's behaviour is that the counting down works a bit differently and sometimes pauses until you type something. (That happens if the remaining seconds are more than 45).

* You can now change the time interval while the robot is running.

* New variables that are substituted in the dialog text. This way the robot can talk about some things you and your "victim" has in common.

$girl and $boy; two persons you know
$tv; A TV show you like
$hobby; something you are into.

(Or leave them to their defaults. Previously introduced variables: $name; the name of the person the robot is talking with. $time; current time)

* 1.5.1 - New checkbox ("address" under $name). If checked, "$name:" will be put in front of every line. Use this to address a specific user in a multi chat.

* 1.5.2 - Now only requires NET 2.0 instead of NET 3.5.

Operation

To use the built in chat dialog, just press the start button and then follow the instructions (which is to focus your chat window within 10 seconds). The chat window will be focused every time the robot wants to write something, and then the focus will be returned to whatever window you had focused. So if you want to do other things with your computer while the robot is running, it is a good idea to uncheck "Typing". That way, this focus switching will be as fast as possible. The downside to having "typing" disabled is that the person in the other end won't see any indication of that you are typing.

Warning: I would recommend you to pause the robot if you do something important, for example paying your bills on the net or something. The robot's keys may occasionally end up in the wrong place if you switch between applications exactly when the robot is typing. Or your own key presses may end up in the chat window if you type exactly when the robot has switched window. You can always see the counting down in the robot's window. It turns red five seconds before the robot's next message. If you want to be on the safe side, don't touch anything when it turns to zero.

Focusing windows

The robot can only focus a whole window. It cannot go to a specific tab or input field of that window, so if you want to run the chat robot in Windows Live Messenger for one person and still want to chat with other people at the same time, you should disable "tabbed conversations" in the Messenger settings so that each conversation has its own window. The same goes for web based chats. With Gmail chat, click on "move out" on the chat window so that it becomes a separate window. Do this before you press "Start" on the Robot.

The robot can type to any window, anywhere, not just to chat windows. The window focused when the robot delivers the first message after you pressed "start" will also get the rest of the messages, until you press stop.

The Editor

Here you can edit the existing dialog or replace it altogether. The dialog is just a bunch of text lines which are used totally randomly by the robot. The robot is a stupid one - he can't see what the other person is writing. Luckily, most human chatters just blurt out a lot of random thoughts, so a robot doing the same thing can actually make some sense to the one he is talking with.

All normal editing shortcuts works, such as Ctrl-A to select all, Ctrl-V to paste etc. You can also use the Save and Load txt buttons for file operation.

Line Sequences
You can separate lines within a line with the vertical | sign. These lines are then used in a sequence to make some sense to the reader to trick him that the robot is responding to his input. For example: “What do you think about Mac computers|Oh well. That's your opinion.|ok”. When the robot randomly selects this line, he will first type: “What do you think about Mac computers” and the next message will be “That's your opinion.” And so on.

The text "$time" will be replaced with the real time, for example 12:30.

Using real chat logs

You can paste in a chat log from for example Windows Live Messenger, Skype or Gmail Talk. Then in the "only from" box, type in the name of the user in the chat log you want to imitate. Then only lines from this user will be used. Check "on same line" if the user names and chat lines appears on the same line, separated by a colon (Skype and Gmail talk).

History

V1.4 - Now avoids repeating lines above a ceirtain length (which you can adjust). When all lines have been used, a red "All used!" indication will be shown and the robot will start over. With the default settings and the built in English dialog, it will take over 6 hours before all lines have been used.

A new variable: $name. It will be replaced in the text with what's in the name box in the window. Default is "my friend". The idea is to type in the name of whoever is talking to the robot.

You can now click on the number counting down to make the next message come right away.

The built in English dialog now consist of 1587 words and the Swedish of 1800 words.

V1.3 - Improvements of the window focusing routine. Fix for the $time variable.
V1.2 - Extended dialogs and a $time variable.
V1.1 - Line sequences (Read further down under Editor)