I did something remarkably similar. In the 90s I independently reinvented Markov chains, although I didn't know that was what it was called. I wrote a mIRC plugin and made a bot with it. I gave it the username "Cybergirl" for both the pun factor and that it encouraged people to message it.
I remember one conversation in particular that, by chance, went so well that it had some poor soul convinced it/she lived in his city and was going to come over.
I also saw a TV episode where a magician demonstrated supposed ability to play simultaneous (round-robin) chess games against multiple grand masters. The conceit behind the trick was that (after the first board) the magician was just mirroring the last move made so that the grand masters were effectively playing each other but didn't know it. That gave me the idea to modify the bot to connect two people through the bot.
I vaguely recall reading a story (probably 15-20-ish years ago) about someone doing exactly that with ICQ (or a similar service - memory is a bit hazy on the details!).
Create a fake profile of an attractive young lady who is interested in chatting to strangers, wait for inbound calls, pair them up with each other & record the resulting audio.
IIRC - the funniest one was a pairing where one participant wasn't phased by the situation they found themselves in, and still wanted the other participant to talk dirty to them...
Sure, any bot running on IRC (e.g. Eliza or A.L.I.C.E.) could run via Bitlbee (IRC to IM gateway originally a fork of Gaim/Pidgin) on other networks such as ICQ. There was also e.g. Licq which could spoof UIN and message, as well as that it had plugins for bots. I also had a friend who ran a sexbot called jenny on DALnet (not the IRC network with the most clever population). Fun times!
I remember one conversation in particular that, by chance, went so well that it had some poor soul convinced it/she lived in his city and was going to come over.
I also saw a TV episode where a magician demonstrated supposed ability to play simultaneous (round-robin) chess games against multiple grand masters. The conceit behind the trick was that (after the first board) the magician was just mirroring the last move made so that the grand masters were effectively playing each other but didn't know it. That gave me the idea to modify the bot to connect two people through the bot.