There's a difference between appearing online and being online, and a new concept program wants to take that to the next level.

You Botter believe it

Conceived during TechCrunch's Disrupt Hackathon earlier this month by developer Irene Chang, The Chat Bot Club aims to create a bot of yourself that convinces friends it's really you talking to them.

Using team communications tool Cisco Spark and processing and language program IBM Watson, this bot can learn your style of communication.

That includes common phrases, and even your favourite emojis to really convince friends that 'you' care about the conversation.

Don't fall behind

If The Chat Bot Club advances past the concept phase, Chang hopes to add APIs that allow the program to integrate Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Kik and more of the most popular chat services.

We've seen before how bots can fail, (Microsoft's Tay springs to mind), but with only your own conversations to worry about, The Chat Bot Club might just work.