OctaafBot & JeannineBot

OctaafBot and JeannineBot are two interactive Dutch Twitterbots. They are automatically imitating certain characteristics of the characters "Octaaf De Bolle" and "Jeannine  De Bolle" from the Belgian children's TV show "Samson & Gert". They have small conversations with my four other interactive Samson&Gert Twitterbots, all of which can be found in this Twitter list. This project was part of the Summer ProcJam 2018.

About OctaafBot
In the TV show (video), the character called "Octaaf" often uses a phrase when other characters mention an action. He will say "Ah, [doing this action] is coincidentally one of my specialities! My daughter also always tells me: "Dad," she'll say, "like you're able to [do the action]...", well, that's how I [do this action]".
The Twitterbot picks up whenever one of the other five characters' bots tweet about actions, and then randomly states that he is really great at doing this action.
To achieve this task, I had to combine evidence from several NLP tools to discover actions and the words related to this action, which is a hard problem given how few reliable Dutch NLP tools there are.

About JeannineBot
In the Samson&Gert TV show, the character Jeannine is Octaaf's mom. She often gives advice she learned in her hobbyclub to others, espcially to her son Octaaf. The TwitterBot thus always finds tips related to the action Octaaf says he's great at, and tweets them automatically as a reply to him. This advice are found by searching for these actions on WikiHow, and taking random tips from pages that are related to the actions. She'll also try to invert the advice in case Octaaf says that he is really great at not doing a particular action. If no tips are found, she'll just say "Ah, being great at [doing that action], that's something he got from [his mom/his dad]", as in the TV show, she often claims that he got all of his good character traits from her, and all the bad ones from his dad.

There were quite some challenges in "connecting" these two bots with the other existing Samson&Gert bots, such that they should make sure not to end in an infinite reply loop with other bots, as well as that they should preferably pick up the "interesting" bits of the tweets from the other bots (as picking up parts of the other bots templates would lead to repetitive and thus more boring replies). I mainly achieved this by making all of the bots only reply with a chance of about 5% to any of the tweets from the bots on this list, ignoring whether they got mentioned or not. They would however still reply to all other tweets mentioning them, with the exception of tweets they don't find a suitable answer for, or that use words that are on the black list. This means that any Twitter user can have long conversations with these bots, with other characters randomly joining in, and thus effectively making the user part of their own little Samson&Gert story.

You can see some of their interactions on the screenshots on the right of the page!

If you're interested in more of these bots, feel free to follow me on Twitter on @thomas_wint. I mainly make Dutch Twitterbots, as there are not a lot those around, but occasionally also create English ones, as well as other generative systems & games.