Chat application for monitoring with scripts

I am looking for a chat application, which would have the ability to interact with a shell script. I need this for a home project. **An example of usage**: A client sends a chat message to a server. It analyzes the incoming message and takes an action in the form of executing a (bash) script. Initially the idea came from this wonderful article . My case is similar, but I will not be using a modem, rather gnokii or Gammu/Wammu with a mobile phone. For the server I am using Debian Wheezy. The clients should be able to use Windows, Linux (Debian in most cases) and Android. Therefore ideally this system would use Skype - both for the chatting and for voice calls. However, Microsoft has decided to drop the support on Skype APIs and that would make the job harder. I am also not very experienced with Delphi and Python, as there seem to be some APIs and libraries for those languages. I have some background in C, bash and Perl. So, I considered using a bot in Skype like sevabot, but have not tried that yet. In addition, it is not very sure for how long Skype will have the existing APIs. Another very nice option seems to be LinPhone with all the above features available. I would need to figure out a bit deeper the interaction with linphonec and linphonecsh, but this software seems to be quite nice. Other ideas that came are using Pidgin or any other chat client that could fulfill the above requirements. Another option would be if I could get this idea realized in the form of a webpage. I have an Apache webserver on the Debian machine, which is running a small Wordpress site. But I think such a setup will be harder to do and not so efficient. And finally, maybe one of the easiest options would be to use e-mail for such a communication. However, this would be not so streamlined and efficient. I would appreciate all the ideas you may have. Which is the most efficient, fast and long-lasting manner to accomplish this goal?