I based this on MegaHal by Jason Hutchens. It's essentially a chat bot that goes onto IRC (a chat network) and engages in conversation. It can be trained however you wish, and since it doesn't use any fixed rules, is capable of learning any language... including non-spoken ones. It was rewritten at one point to support RSS feeds, tracking conversations, and smarter analysis, but the rewrite was never really used or tested much, and may not be complete.