The latest in viral Twitter bots, @tofu_product aims to "write like you do" — because "tofu absorbs flavor."
"Don't listen to checkmate atheists," tweets @tofu_product, but don't assume it's a wise Chinese proverb. In fact, the bot is actually trying to copy another Twitter user.
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"I've always been a huge fan of conversation bots and of natural language processing in general," programmer Joseph Toscano and creator of the account tells Mashable. Toscano and his friends have created various conversation bots in their free time, but this time, Toscano wanted to develop something specifically for Twitter.
@surfsupextreme TV: President Obama has pumpkin scones.
— tofu (@tofu_product) October 9, 2013
"With so many people posting status updates so frequently, I thought it would be an excellent way to get source material for a bot while basically guaranteeing that amusing results would be generated," he says. "There's just so much content!"
Indeed, the account grew tenfold from under 200 followers Tuesday to more than 2,100 followers at the time of writing. In order for it to work, a user must tweet at @tofu_product, then it will respond with a phrase "similar" to the user's past tweets.
According to Toscano, the bot is written using mostly open source Apple-sponsored technologies, including Objective-C, clang, Cocoa and libdispatch. "By using these technologies, I'm able to do interesting language processing at very high performance, utilizing all of the resources of the host machine," Toscano says.
As for the actual algorithm that @tofu_product uses, Toscano hopes to keep that as a secret for now. While he's been working on the algorithm for several years, the specific implementation that @tofu_product uses took a mere three days to perfect, though Toscano is still refining as necessary. "It's not terribly complex," he says, "but it produces results that frequently make me laugh. That's good enough for me, and hopefully for a lot of Twitter users out there."
@tofu_product You're pretty accurate, bot.
— Stephanie Buck (@StephMBuck) October 9, 2013
Whatever the secret algorithm, it seems to be working. While some replies from @tofu_product seem like nonsensical riddles, many are creepily spot-on. In fact, there are many users engaging in back-and-forth Twitter chats with the bot, testing the bot's ability. @tofu_product even works for different languages, with foreign tweets ranging from Danish to Spanish.
Despite its eerie ability to copy other Twitter users, Toscano assures us @tofu_product is indeed 100% a bot (unlike @horse_ebooks), aside from tweets that the account initiates itself when it escapes from Twitter's rate-limiting.
As for interactive Twitter bots, Toscano thinks they're here to stay. "Tofu is perhaps a bit different because of how close it gets to each individual Twitter user," Toscano says. "While there are bots that interact in different ways with users, Tofu is –- I think -– the first to mimic a user's writing style. That level of interaction is new, and I think we'll probably see more bots like Tofu soon."
Image: Flickr, postbear.