Software to create an automated bot for desktop applications

Question

Please recommend software that can help to write an automated bot that can interact with other desktop applications.

I'm looking for something that can help me write a bot for desktop games.

• scan whole desktop
• recognize text and custom graphics and ability to build logic on top of that
• performa basic UI interaction actions: mouse, keyboard actions

P.S. I was thinking about some automation software like autoit, selenium, etc, but haven't used those and not sure they can do it.

Answer 1

Basically what you are looking for was developed as Sikuli by the Sikuli Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder and is now maintained and further developed as SikuliX by RaiMan and the open source community.

It is free, gratis & open source (MIT Licenced) and provides:

• Search the Desktop visually for specific components & events
• Interact with those components, click, type, ect.
• IDE for putting things together & basic scripting
• Scriptable in Python, Ruby or JavaScript.

Current Documents for the 2014 version are here there is a new version SikuliX2 under development at the time of writing.