string based conversation

[MickeyB]

Going out on a far, thin limb here (maybe  )  I am working on a game concept and inside this game would be a chat system between players and between npc's.   When talking with an npc, I owuld like to take a typed sentence and parse it out , use some AI to come up with the npc's possible answers and respond.  I know this sounds like a headache, but it is something I want to attempt.  Anyone done this?  Have any thoughts, other than dont do it this way ?

[zammbi]

Iirc Planeshift MMORPG does its npcs like this. Its open source the last I looked too.
http://www.planeshift.it/