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theBot
Amy Alexander
Bots (or spiders) are the software that follows the links on the web to create the databases for search engines. So bots get to see the narrative of the web... theBot is one such bot - but it works in reverse to reveal and speak the "untold story" of the web.
When fed a searchterm by a visitor, theBot performs a search for the word or phrase in a search engine. It then selects one page from the choices returned by the search engine, and reads a piece of text from the page. From there, it crawls to a linked page, and continues reading scraps of text from each page it visits as it crawls from page to page. If theBot cannot link out from a page or gets tired after too long on a given server, it backs up along its path and moves out in a different direction. Easily bored, theBot tries to move between different servers as much as possible and will never visit the same page twice unless fooled into it. As something of a reverse search engine, theBot provides a look (and listen) into the narrative of the web - or at least into the stream of consciousness of a web Bot.
Technical details:
Front end: Lingo
Back end: Perl, Festival speech synthesis, LAME mp3 encoding.
Year: 2000
Please read this disclaimer before downloading
download here | report broken link
project homepage: http://thebot.plagiarist.org
keywords: talking-realtime-perl-goofy-speech-
pop_culture-performance-criticism-unix-robot-
poetry-algorithmic-lingo software for the Internet
category: bots and agents
uploaded by amy, 06 Jan 2003
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