While at the Virtual Worlds JISC day up in Stirling, I saw a demonstration of in-world chatbots.

The Daden Prime sim has a chatbot avatar, Abi Carver. You can visit her in world, or talk to her on their chatbots.co.uk website. Like most chatbots, she’s fairly limited as a conversational partner. However, I’m told she’s beginning to get some sense of memory and emotion – and that she has situational awareness and motivation. This may be the case, although I failed to spot it.

I guess she does indicate a way forward, though. When you meet a new avatar in Second Life you may well have a bizarre conversation – either because you both have different first languages, or because one or both of you is doing something different in the real world. So, without the visual cues provided by Abi looking like a bot, she doesn’t need to talk very well in order to fool passers-by.

As the website says, chatbots like these have a future as greeters, information sources, tour guides and non-player characters.