Every quarter, Yahoo! holds a hack day when engineers are given 24 hours to dream up an idea and build it out– it’s a way to promote innovation in the developer ranks. I’ve seen some very innovative stuffs in the past. So this past hack day, I worked with two of my co-workers David & Ahmed to build a chat or IM “robot”. Very geeky but also very cool…

A chat or IM bot is basically a piece of software that acts like a real chat buddy: you send it a message and it replies with a response to you. We called our bot Alfred, Batman’s confidante and assistant. The idea is that this is an all-knowing chat buddy. You send it a question like “How do I make a grilled cheese sandwich?” and it will return to you an answer by searching Yahoo! Answers database. In this case, the bot will send back a chat message with instructions on making the sandwich! You send it a command like “tell me about 2008 Olympics” and it will return you the popular links del.icio.us users have bookmarked about the 2008 Olympics.

I had a lot of fun hacking Alfred, probably the most satisfying piece of code I’ve written at Yahoo! Check out Sarah Bacon’s coverage of our hacks at the official Yahoo! Messenger blog, including a screen shot.