This New Text Bot Will Do Your Ghosting for You

If you are a member of the dating public, you have likely ended your romance with someone--or been slowly snubbed--by a drawn-out, awkward string of text messages and silence. For the uninitiated, this practice of smothering a personal relationship to death by withdrawing from communication is known as ghosting, and there's now a pretty mean chatbot who will do this for you. Users can access the bot through Burner, an app that specializes in providing people with temporary or secondary phone numbers that are used by consumers ranging from online daters who want privacy to charter boat captains who want to separate their personal and business lives on their cell. The company collaborated with screenwriter Peter Miriani and bot-makers Voxable to launch the feature. Though the bot will usually wait anywhere from several minutes to several hours before responding with a ghosting text, for testing purposes the bot was set to go back-and-forth in real time.