I Want A Second Life Bot - But What Kind Should I Get?

The first question is - do you want a bot companion - an AI-powered friend or servant that you want to have follow your orders?  We'll call that an "autonomous" bot.

OR do you want to turn yourself into a bot? Perhaps for someone else - an "owner" - to use, with the AI system either guiding or fully controlling your actions.  We'll call that self-bottification.

For an autonomous bot - there are two possibilities.

The first is to have an object in Second Life as your autonomous bot.  This could be a 1-prim box but most people will be interested in having a moving, walking, sitting, etc., being.  An object that can do this in SL is called an animesh object (animated mesh).  An animesh bot is just an object in SL, and as such - does not require any login (once rezzed it will stay there indefinitely or until someone deletes or returns it).  Also an animesh can be directly "sat upon" and animate the sitter which is kind of neat. An animesh also costs "land impact" and can only be rezzed in places where you have the right to rez stuff.  The bad news about this is that nice-looking animesh humanoids have a land impact of 100 prims - or more!  Here's an example of an autonomous animesh bot in my SL Marketplace store. There are a bunch of animeshes rezzed in my Animesh Annex in West Mill.

The alternative is to build an "altbot" which is essentially a second login (or "alt") which is set up as a usual SL avatar, with clothes, hair and so on.  Then you can add an AI control system to it.  One possibility is one of my "wearable" systems which provides a mesh body in a ready-to-go package, like this.  This is good if you don't have a body yet and want an easy "turnkey" altbot solution.  Altbots typically use the RLV system in SL to control the avatar.  There are a few altbots using wearables in the Animesh Annex.

However, if you already have a nice body - and many people in SL do - you don't want another body. So then you can get this system which provides the AI and control for any body.  This "controller" system also comes in a male version.  These controllers have proven to be quite popular - because they are an add-on to an existing avatar - and the base AI inside it is totally reconfigurable to allow you to set it up for whatever purpose you like. If you want to see an altbot in action - visit the store and talk to Traci - who is using the controller to play the role of a helpful store salesperson.

An altbot has the huge advantage of having zero land impact, no matter what hair or other attachments you have on.  It can sit wherever you like on standard SL furniture - in general do anything a usual av can do.  You do need to log it in so you need a second "viewer" running somewhere - but that could be on a non-video viewer to save memory cost on your computer.  However, most modern PCs are quite capable of running two Firestorm windows logged in at once - each login typically uses 1 Gb of memory.  

And of course - an altbot is an example of self-bottification - when you log in as your alt - you are a bot!