A brief history of chatbots.

The news about artificial intelligence’ development technology dominated in 2017. After the event, the 2018 year was dedicated to the development of all the technologies based on artificial intelligence already available. As the main goal of artificial intelligence is to make computers as smart or even smarter than humans, there was done a huge effort over the years in this context.
The chatbot. This is one of the most crucial and representative descendants of this field and one of the most attractive branches of this complex area, gaining more and more ground every day. In order to bring to mind: what is a chatbot? Generally speaking, a chatbot represents a program that simulates the behavior and the attitude of a real person in a discussion, being efficient, having its own set of tools just to achieve the “point of destination”.
Perhaps we think artificial intelligence is new, more then that, as a rule, chatbots are considered to be a technology that is materializing nowadays, and does not date back very long in time. The reality is different. This paradox is described in almost every article that was written on this subject matter. Did you know that scientists think about human-like robots even before thinking about computers? Amazingly, this idea quickly spread and without realizing it, humankind created perfect opponents, opponents that may not eclipse.
The obsession with artificial intelligence began the last century, a time when humanity was indubitable very far from technologies without which we can not imagine our existence today. It was just the beginning of an era where robots slowly approached human intelligence. This process was and hereinafter is a complex one, with its near victories, and certainly some unfortunate experiences.
Particularly Chatbots appeared in the 50s of the last century. It is quite a long while ago if we are talking about the times when an average consumer had no access to the internet.
The very first chatbot in history is known by the name of “Eliza”. “Eliza” was created in 1966, by Joseph Weizenbaum at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The fundamental intention of this chatbot was to reproduce the behavior of a Rogerian psychotherapist, that is to say, person-centered therapy allowing the program to keep a conversation through pattern matching and substitution. With these techniques, Weizenbaum’s program was able to make some people believe that they had a conversation with a real person. Thus, some argue that Eliza would be the first program able to pass the Turing test, which measures the ability of the machines to behave as an actual person does.
Another legendary chatbot was developed at Standford University in 1972. Its name is “Parry”, that is an adjusted version of “Eliza”. Parry, was developed by Kenneth Colby to mimic the judgment of a paranoid schizophrenic. This chatbot was much more advanced at generating artificial intelligence and due to all these advantages, it was the first machine that was able to pass finally just a version of the Turing Test. The main difference between Eliza and Parry consists in the fact that “Parry” was a chatbot with attitude, while Eliza just took some keywords from a user’s message presenting a question about it. Even though, it is equitable to mention that the chatbots Eliza and Perry are some of the most notable progenitors of today’s artificial intelligence.
Not a long time after Parry, the Jabberwocky chatbot was developed in 1981 by Rollo Carpenter, who was a British programmer. And here it is! The very first chatbot that is able to simulate the human voice. There was a certain, well-defined goal that came along with its creation: to pass a true Turing test.
The next chatbot appeared in 1992. Its name was Doctor Sbaisto and this chatbot imitated the answers of a psychologist, having a User Interface. Doctor Sbaisto had a very strange digitized voice, but it was notorious for having a correct intonation while speaking and also a good grammar.
In 1995 it appeared ALICE. It was indubitably the most popular chatbot of the 20th century. Signifying “ Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity”, ALICE was developed by Richard Wallace and was a Lobner Prize winner three times, in 2000, 2001 & 2004. About ALICE it’s important to say that although it was not capable of passing the Turing test, it was an open-source chatbot with notable matching patterns and also was capable of natural language processing, as a result, it was able to keep more complex conversations.
And here we are, step by step we are getting closer to “transformation”. By “transformation” we mean the time when it was made the transition to messaging platforms, to short message service while standalone applications and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) remained behind. In this sense, perhaps the best example is SmarterChild chatbot, which appeared in 2001. Unlike its predecessors, SmarterChild was able not just to sustain a conversation, it performed many other beneficial functions like presenting information about weather, sports score, some news and so forth.
It was the bot which in a way inspired the development of such giants like Apple’s Siri and Samsung’s S Voice which acts comparable to a personal assistant, accomplishing a rich spectrum of user commands.
Finally, here is the real revolution. After the roaring success demonstrated by Watson, another chatbot created by International Business Machines, other gigantic companies like Amazon, Google and others “entered the scheme”, breaking the ice completely.
At this moment, names like Cortana, Alexa, Google now have a serious repute. The chatbots experiences are going to the next level. These machines tooled with artificial intelligence are helping us with our everyday tasks like reminders, searching the Internet, checking basic information and so on. It is true that presently we are using chatbots with acceleration, but technological progress that we follow today is a natural and welcomed process.