A few weeks ago I started speaking to one David Williams who was interested in taking his artifical intelligence “chat-eBots”, which are sold as virtual hosts for sites, and putting them on mobile phones in an altered form. We discussed a few technologies and a few ideas but unfortunately I had to dip out of the project due to commitments. Anyway, David has gone ahead and produced the entire thing in Flash Lite, and you can demo the first of these eBots, “Retch”, on the companion site, as well as purchase a copy for your handset.
In the demo, as you don’t get a focus rectangle around the textfield you might have to move your mouse around a bit to find the input box at the bottom of the screen.
Whilst you may not reach a great deal of people through a website alone, I can imagine this being bought up and developed by an operator or content provider, branded to suit their needs (a la Crazy Frog), and sold as a download to kids along with the other games and multimedia content on offer with a price on par with standard games via SMS delivery or OTA.
Retch is full of one-liners and responds to keywords in your phrases so be sure to check it out at: http://www.mobile.chatebot.com
If you are a content provider or a network reading this post, I would be happy to put you in touch with David, or you can contact him on the above site.