What are chatbots?

What is a chatbot?

A chatbot is an artificial intelligence based computer program that simulates human conversations via auditory or textual methods. Chatbots are also known as chat robot, chatterbot, talk bot etc.

The term ‘Chatter Bot’ was coined by Michael Mauldin in 1994, who is actually the creator of the first Verbot.

They are typically used for various practical purposes such as customer service, marketing systems or information acquisition. Chatbots are widely used in communication, design, developer tools, education, entertainment, news, personal, productivity, shopping, sports, health, marketing, food, tarvel, utilities and finances.

Mostly all websites and social media platforms are using chatbots for easy and efficient customer communication.

History of Chatbots

The idea of chatbots first came indirectly during the Turing Test in 1950. The Turing Test, developed by Alan Turing, is actually a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of human. But they are far short of being able to pass the Turing Test.

1 ELIZA- 1966

But officially the first chatbot was developed in the 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum, a MIT professor. It was called ELIZA. It was created in the MIT AI laboratory, and its work was to conduct human conversations by matching user inputs to scripted responses. It uses a script that simulated a psychotherapist. One of the biggest drawback of this was, it had no built-in frameworks but it just gave an understanding, what actually chatbots are.

There was a huge upliftment in the computer industry, as it created a technology that can interact with humans. Many experts started declaring chatbots would be indistinguishable from human intellect within the coming few years. But Weizembaum just considered it as a tool or the extension of human mind. However ELIZA was a huge success.

Eliza Chatbot

To know more click here.

2 PARRY- 1972

Next in 1972 an American psychiatrist Kenneth Colby constructed a chatbot PARRY, based on paranoid schizophrenic behavior. It embedded a conversational strategy and was much more serious than ELIZA. PARRY works via complicated system of assumptions. It was used to interact with the mentally dis-balanced people. In the 1970s Kenneth was only psychiatrist to work on chatbots and he giva a message how computer could contribute to the medical science.

Parry Chatbot

Click here to know more.

JABBERWACKY- 1988

In 1988 a British programmer Rollo Carpenter created a technically improved chatbot, named as JABBERWACKY. It was designed to mimic human interaction and to carry out conversations with users. It was designed to carry out any other functions. It was also used for advanced technical research through its website. Later in 1997, they launched Cleverbot, an evolved version of JABBERWACKY. It is more fuzzy and with deeper context.

Jabberwacky chatbot

Want to test the Jabberwack? Click here.

4 Dr. Sbaitso- 1992

Dr. Sbaitso was designed in 1992 by Creative Labs for MS-Dos. It assumed the role of a psychologist when interacting with humans and it was used to showcase digitized voice. But it cannot conduct any complicated conversations other than psychological questions.

Dr. Sbaisto Chatbot

To know more click here.

5 A.L.I.C.E.- 1995

A.L.I.C.E. stands for Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity is a natural language processing bot which uses Heuristic pattern matching to carry out conversations. It was the first to run on computer by the name Alice and hence it was called Alicebot formerly. It can be accessed using internet in their web-page. It won the Loebner Prize in September 2004 beating Jabberwacky.

A.L.I.C.E. Chatbot

Here you can know more about it.

6 SmarterChild- 2000

SmarterChild can be best described as the precursor of Apple’s Siri and Smasung’s Voice. It was an intelligent chatbot that covers SMS networks, buddy lists of AOL and MSN messenger users.

It was founded in 2000 by Robert Hoffer, Timothy Kay and Peter Levitan. The idea for instant messaging bots came from the team's vision to add natural language comprehension functionality to the increasingly popular instant messaging and SMS platforms.

The rapid success of SmarterChild led to targeted marketing-oriented bots for Radiohead, Austin
Powers, Intel, Keebler, The Sporting News and others.

SmarterChild Chatbot

7 IBM Watson-2006

IBM Watson is a general question-answering computer system posed in natural language processing. It was developed by IBM’s project research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. It was named after IBM’s founder Thomas J. Watson.

I was originally designed to compete on the TV show ‘Jeopardy!’, in which it beat two of the shows former champions.

We can develop bots for our websites using the IBM Watson framework, buts that’s we will learn on another blog.

IBM Watson

8 Siri-2010

Siri is the virtual assistant of Apple which was developed in 2010 and is widely used in iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS operating systems. This is one of the most famous chatbot in recent times. It actually work like a messenger, either by voice or texting.

Siri of Apple Inc

9 Google Now-2012

Google Now was launched in 2012 by the Google Inch company. It is a virtual assistant capable of answering questions, performing tasks and was developed for Google Search app. It is mostly known as Google Assistant, and now it is considered to be one of the smartest chatbot. Google Now has knowledge about everything and can answer any type of questions. It can also be accessed using both voice and texts. This is now even integrated in the smart home device of Google, Google Home.

It has a beautiful VUI (Voice-User-Inteface), probably the best and has unique features that other chatbots are lacking. It is still giving a tough competition to Siri, Cortana and Alexa.

Google Assistant

1 Alexa- 2015

Alexa is an intelligent virtual assistant of Amazon that was founded in 2015, which inhabits the Amazon Echo device. It also uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand user prompts. Amazon recently launched Amazon Echo Show that not only gives answer to certain questions but also has a display output. That is it has both VUI (Voice User Interface) and GUI (Graphical User Inteface).

Amazon Alexa

1 Cortana-2015

Microsoft wasn’t far to have its first chatbot or virtual assistant, hence they developed their virtual assistant Cortana in the middle of 2015. It is also quite similar to Alexa, Siri or Google Now. But according to me it is not as smart as them. There are still more to improve in Cortana. But they are capable of answering questions and performing tasks.

Microsoft Cortana

1. Tay-2016

In 2016, Microsoft made a new chatbot to mimic the speech, behavior and habits of a teenage girl. But unfortunately it had to shut down just 16 hours after launch as it began to post offensive tweets and increasingly became paranoid.

Tay of Microsoft

Later many chatbots were developed in the early 2017 for different social networking sites like, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp etc..

Chatbot History

Why we need Chatbots?

You probably wondering about, why we need chatbots? They are just simple text-based services what’s the use of them? Right?

Well I can help you in that respect. Chatbots are one of the most emerging technology. This is because having a chatbot lessens your work and time. Previously when there was no chatbots, companies used to appoint people for answering general FAQs to the customer. But having chatbots they can answer them automatically, hence it saves time, money and effort. Moreover it is available 24x7, all time. Hence people can access them anywhere anytime. I think this is one of the biggest advantage of having the chatbot.

Well we can develop our own chatbots for our websites, facebook messenger, WhatsApp etc.. For that you have to wait for the next blogs.

To know how can we develop our own chatbots, click here.

Thank You for reading this. Hope this helped you a lot.

See you on next blog.😊😊

What are chatbots?

What is a chatbot?