A Virtual Friend in FLEX: iwobot

For the final project of Multimedia Authoring course at VU, I decided to make a virtual friend using Flex & Actionscript 3 and Twitter API. Here you can read the description text I wrote again for the course:

The Idea
I want to make a virtual friend (iwobot) who can:

• act as a usual interface between me and the people who are visiting my website
• be a guide for the visitors of my website in the pre-defined cases
• let the visitors of my website interact and play games with him

Functionalities
Here are the use cases and functionalities I want my robot to have:

1. iwobot will use 1 twitter account (iwobotTwitterAccound) as a data feed
2. The user will be able to feed the robot with input text through the user interface
3. The user will be able to choose actions for iwobot to take (like jump, walk etc.) by clicking on buttons in the tool box of the application
4. The user will be able to interact with the robot by giving him objects (by dragging and dropping an apple from the tool box to the canvas where the robot is drawn)
5. There will be pre-defined questions and answers set, like a Frequently Asked Questions, if the input text the user enters looks like one of these questions or simple commands, then they will be interpreted right away by the iwobot engine and the user will be able to see the reaction quickly
6. Otherwise the idle animation will play until the admin receives the question in his twitter account and answers it (The idle animation may be thinking or sleeping etc.)
7. The text that the user entered (as told in number 2), will seemlessly be sent to iwobotTwitterAccount from iwobotTwitterAccount if the engine couldn’t handle the message itself