Instant message bots are all the rage at the moment. Twitter has an IM bot, Google has recently provided language translation via instant messaging.
For example, invite en2zh@bot.talk.google.com to be your friend on
Google Talk and it will translate English text to Chinese.
There are 24 bots currently available: ar2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fr2de, fr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, zh2en. As some have guessed, this is a 20% project, and while machine translation isn’t perfect, we hope these bots can be helpful in bridging language barriers.
Seen via blogscoped.