Ever see a “bot” automatically (and eerily) answering questions on Twitter and wish you could make one yourself? Guess what? You can!

There’s a Twitter bot that not only answers questions, it shares its source code – so you can copy it and make a creepy little assistant of your very own!

@DearAssistant is a Twitter bot made by Amit Agarwal (@labnol) to answer your questions, like these:

In his post explaining the process, Agarwal claims you can do this in five minutes, but don’t judge yourself too harshly if you can’t. There appear to be quite a few steps and just reading through the directions the first time around will likely take five minutes. At least it did for me:

The bot uses Wolfram Alpha to run. And aw, isn’t that cute – it thinks that’s its name:

Wolfram|Alpha “introduces a fundamentally new way to get knowledge and answers—not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms, and methods.”
Calling it “a mini version of Siri,” Wolfram Alpha can “answer queries that Google can’t,” including questions about:

• Location
• Date & time
• Food
• Time zones
• Astronomy
• Finance
• Colors
• Comparisons
• Weather
• How members of your family are related
• And more…

So what are you waiting for? Check out the source code Agarwal freely offers and get to work! And feel free to post a link to your bot in the comments.