A Brief History Into Chatbots

Chatbots have been rising in popularity in the digital world these past few years. But do you know the history of the chatbots actually came to be?

In this blog, we will take you through the life and development of what chatbots are today.

1950 - The Turing Test#

Scientist Alan Turing theorized that an intelligent machine would be able to carry human interaction via text-only conversations. This simple idea essentially laid the foundations for the chatbot revolution

1966 - Eliza#

Eliza is an early natural language processing computer program created in the MIT AI Labs to simulate human conversations by matching user prompts to scripted responses. This gave an illusion of understanding, but had no built in framework for contextualizing events

1972 - Parry#

Compared to Eliza, Parry 's simulation is based from a person with paranoid schizophrenia invented by Kenneth Colby. Parry was best described as an ELIZA with attitude. It embodied a more conversational strategy than the previous creation

1988 - Jabberwacky#

This was developed in 1980 but was released online in 1997. The Jabberwacky chatbot was created to simulate natural human chat in an interesting, entertaining and comedic manner.

1992 - Dr. Sbaitso#

An AI speech synthesis program created for MS DOS - based pcs. Dr. Sbaitso assumed the role of a psychologist when intereacting with others and was designed to showcase a digitized voice.

1995 - Alice#

The "artificial linguistic internet computer entity" was a natural language processing bot. Alice could apply heuristic pattern matching rules to human input in order to have a conversation but was still not able to pass the Turing Test.

2001 - Smarterchild#

Smarterchild is an intelligent bot widely distributed across SMS networks and buddy lists of AOL and MSN messenger users. Back then, it offered a fun personalized conversatios and was considered a harbinger to Apple's Siri and Samsung's voice.

2006 - IBM's Watson#

The original purpose of Watson was originally designed to compete on the TV show "Jeopardy!", where he actually beat two of the show's former champions. Watson has since then gone on to bigger and better things using natural language processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of data.

2010 - Siri#

Siri is an intelligent personal assistant. It is part of Apple's IOS and uses a natural language UI to answer questions and perform various requests. Siri did the groundwork for all later AI bots and personal assistants.

2015 - Alexa#

Amazon created their own personal assistant called ALEXA. Alexa inhabits the Amazon echo device. She is capable of voice interaction using natural language processing algorithms to receive, recognize and respond to voice commands.

2015 - Cortana#

Also on the same year, Microsoft's version of the intelligent assistant that can set reminders and answer questions using the Bing search engine. Cortaa recognizes natural voice commands and is available in a number of different languages.

2016 - Bots for Messenger#

In April 2016, Facebook launched a messenger platform which allows developers to create bots that can interact with Facebook users. At the end of that year, 34,000 bots were available covering a wide range use of cases.

Quite interesting how it all started over 70 years ago right?

AhaChat chatbots fall under the bots for Messenger category and its specialty is to help grow your brand with interesting strategies. Check our documents and the rest of the blog out to know more. Try AhaChat today!