I hadn't seen this one before, but it's still not what I'm looking for. Perlbot assumes an IRC connection. Perlbot takes control of the program flow. I'm looking for a bot that will passively wait for my program to hand it some data, give me a response to that data, and then return control of the program. Something like:

use CleanBot;
my $cleanbot = CleanBot->new('cleanbot-init.conf');
while($line=<get_data_from_a_source_the_bot_doesn't_care_about>){
    my $response = $cleanbot->parse($line);
    Do_something_the_bot_doesn't_care_about($response) if $response;
}
[download]

So the above loop could be used for an IRC connection, a GAIM plugin, even an FTP client if I wanted one with attitude. The bot itself would be persistent during the connection (it could remember data from line to line), and it wouldn't be hard to have it be persistent from invocation to invocation.