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If you watched Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and thought, “Boy, that Groot. He sure seems insightful. If only there was some way I could just, I don’t know, like text him in times of emotional need, just to get his wisdom,” then good news! You can — or, at least, the next-best thing.
Ricky Robinett, a developer at Twilio, has created a chatbot that responds to every text message it receives with the same three words: “I am Groot.” No matter what message you send to (866) 740-4531, you will get exactly the same response: “I am Groot.”
The bot was first reported on Monday by tech site TechCrunch, and since then, has proven to be impressively popular; by Tuesday afternoon, Robinett tweeted that Groot “may have a text message addiction. He’s now sent over 30,000 messages.” Particularly impressive is the fact that, according to an earlier tweet, that number had risen by 10,000 messages in just an hour.
If nothing else, this cements Groot’s place as the breakout character of the summer movie season. He can dance, he can produce flowers for adorable little children with inky smudges on their faces, and now it turns out that he can dominate the burgeoning chatbot market. Is there anything that Groot can’t do? Well, besides expand his vocabulary, of course (although he can, at least, speak multiple languages).
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