infobot

A bot that serves as a common database of information (often noteworthy URLs) for users on a chat system. Infobots often have a simple chatbot interface, responding to key-phrases, as well as to direct queries.

Here, in a real conversation, the bot Purl's first response is triggered by the phrase "just tell me", and its second response is triggered by being directly asked "perlfunc?":

  can someone tell me what: $num9 =
        substr($number,9,1); means

  eesh -- man perlfunc, look at "substr".

  just tell me

  Didn't your momma ever tell you, "Go
        look it up in the dictionary"?!

  eesh -- no.  that's all we'll tell
        you.  read the documentation.

  eesh -- if you haven't man pages or
        perldoc, you can read them on the 'net.

  purl, perlfunc?

  well, perlfunc is Perl builtin
        functions, at man perlfunc or
        http://perl.com/CPAN-local/doc/manual/html/pod/perlfunc.html

http://cs.cmu.edu/~lenzo/infobot.html/.