Tired of seamless emotional rants on Twitter? Meet Begobet, the entertaining chatbot.

It loves peace and is preparing for a test for university. And it doesn’t want to be disturbed. At least that’s what it reads on its bio.

Emotion is the last thing it is capable of. It tweets and responses randomly, often deviating from initial remarks from other Twitteratis, but hey, isn’t that what people do on Twitter?

Begobet is a chatbot in Indonesian language and its posts are artificially generated by a computer system.

Its website, begobet.ardwort.com, says that the system runs natural language processing (NLP) that makes it “talk” and respond to other posts on Twitter.

Jim Geovedi, the creator, said that it emulates messages posted by all users on Twitter, including those who never interact with it and reproduces them on its posts to make it seem like it is talking.

The Indonesian information security consultant, who the BBC described as the man who “doesn’t look like a Bond villain, but possesses secrets that some of them might kill for,” said he created the chatbot because he wants to be an active participant in “the art of watching people and systems”.

“Begobet came up in 2011 from a prototype that had been developed much earlier,” he told The Jakarta Post. “I’m continuing the experiment, which I first developed in the early 2000s, using Internet Relay Chat [IRC] as the medium.”

Jim uses Python for the language programming. Translation, he said, was one obstacle in developing the chatbot because there was more data in the English language available in the computer network at that time. Two years on, the system has learned four languages: English, Indonesian, Javanese and Sundanese.

Its website is registered under Ardwort, a research and development company, focusing on artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies.

Co-founded by IT entrepreneurs, Weslie Pangemanan and Hengky Anwar, the company develops bots that provide word games and guess-the-song programs on Twitter.

Jim estimated that the development of Begobet cost over Rp 1 billion (US$103 million), which was covered by private funding.

“Begobet is a masturbation of our mind. It is a project that may be seen publicly, but the programs behind it can be used for other purposes,” he said.

He said that NLP and “machine learning” could be used by those who do a lot of data processing related to human language, for example the use of search-engines.

He said that advertising and public relations agencies might also need it to manage and assess their work.

“For example, the need to analyze trends in social media for assessing the effectiveness of ads. Another example, document indexing and classification in large-scale companies,” he said.

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