Rollo Carpenter, a chatbot programmer, hopes to automate the high-level functions too, by developing software that can directly replace human operators.
His chatbot, called Jabberwacky, has been trained by analysing over 10m typed conversations held online with visitors to its website (see jabberwacky.com).
Dr Brahnam has also found that the appearance of the chatbot's on-screen persona, or avatar, has a significant impact on how much abuse is levelled at it.