Megahal/Hailo (cpanm -n hailo for Perl users) can still be fun too.

Usage:

      hailo -t corpus.txt -b brain.brn

Where "corpus.txt" should be a file with one sentence per line. Easy to do under sed/awk/perl.

      hailo -b brain.brn

This spawns the chatbot with your trained brain.

By default Hailo chooses the easy engine. If you want something more "realistic", pick the advanced one mentioned at 'perldoc hailo' with the -e flag.