I got thinking about the implications of IM-Bots when I worked for the TSSG research group in Ireland. IM-Bots are pseudo-intelligent automated IM buddys that responds to queries using greater or lesser degrees of Natural Language Parsing (NLP) and knowledge inference. One of the most famous is the Alice-Bot which uses Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) to associate semantics (like running a program) with parsed syntax. I've written a paper about using IM-Bots as virtual shopping assistants which is available here