Recently we released two Jabber buddy bots for dictionary lookup. By adding eng.mal.dict@gmail.com as a chat contact one can ask for the meaning of an English word in Malayalam by just sending a chat message. Similarly for English-Hindi or Hindi-English dictionary, we have another bot eng.hin.dict@jabber.org. Both of these dictionaries use Dict databases based on DICT protocol.
Both of these bots were well received by the users. We have 8000+ users for English-Malayalam Dictionary. Online blogs/media also gave good publicity. Thanks a lot!.
SMC developers Rajeesh Nambiar, Ershad, Ragsagar, and Sarath Lakshman had helped in improving the program. You can get the source code from here. It is a small program written using python XMPP library.
We had written this programs one year back, 2009 december itself. We could not launch them for public since we did not had a server to host them. Usually webhosting providers wont allow to run programs like this in their servers. Recently netdotnet.com provided a VPS server for SMC and we could launch them from that server.
English-Hindi dictionary is reasonably big, but English-Malayalm is very small with only ~10k words. So we just added a Malayalam Wiktionary backend for the bot.
Here is a video on how to use English-Hindi bot prepared by Varun Verma
- An article about English Malayalam bot in Epathram.com here.
- A blog post by Sailesh in Hindi http://emadad.hindyugm.com/2010/10/know-hindi-meanings-while-chatting.html
We can start this kind of bot for other languages too, if we have dictionaries with Free S/w compatible licenses. If interested, please contact me.