Developer creates chatbot which can pretend to be you in group messages

The 'Chat Bot Club' program makes it easier to ignore your nearest and dearest than ever before

Your friends won't be able to tell the difference between you and the robot (Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

If you're too busy, lazy or antisocial to keep up with all the conversations happening in your Facebook Messenger inbox, then an American developer has just created the perfect program for you.

During the recent TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon in New York, Irene Chang made the The Chat Bot Club - a program that essentially creates a robotic version of yourself, which can post messages in conversations and trick your friends into thinking that you're actually there.

Using the Cisco Spark messaging app as her platform, Chang used IBM's Watson chatbot software to build the program, TechCrunch reports.

The Chat Bot Club monitors your messages and gradually learns your messaging 'style', building up a database of your typical reponses, favourite phrases, and most-used emojis.

The bot can then send messages to your group chats, making it seem like you're paying attention while you focus on more important things.

Obviously, the bot can only do so much. It's not going to be able to respond to meaningful questions very well, and other users in the group would probably realise they're talking to a bot fairly quickly.

But if you just want to appear as though you're not completely ignoring the conversation, it works quite well. It's very much an experimental service at the minute, but Chang is working on integrating it into services like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and more.