by responding to any input that contains the word 'MOTHER' with 'TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY'). ĮLIZA's key method of operation (copied by chatbot designers ever since) involves the recognition of clue words or phrases in the input, and the output of the corresponding pre-prepared or pre-programmed responses that can move the conversation forward in an apparently meaningful way (e.g. The object of this paper is to cause just such a re-evaluation of the program about to be "explained". With that thought, he moves the program in question from the shelf marked "intelligent", to that reserved for curios. The observer says to himself "I could have written that". its magic crumbles away it stands revealed as a mere collection of procedures. But once a particular program is unmasked, once its inner workings are explained. machines are made to behave in wondrous ways, often sufficient to dazzle even the most experienced observer. However Weizenbaum himself did not claim that ELIZA was genuinely intelligent, and the introduction to his paper presented it more as a debunking exercise:
The notoriety of Turing's proposed test stimulated great interest in Joseph Weizenbaum's program ELIZA, published in 1966, which seemed to be able to fool users into believing that they were conversing with a real human. This criterion depends on the ability of a computer program to impersonate a human in a real-time written conversation with a human judge to the extent that the judge is unable to distinguish reliably-on the basis of the conversational content alone-between the program and a real human. In 1950, Alan Turing's famous article " Computing Machinery and Intelligence" was published, which proposed what is now called the Turing test as a criterion of intelligence.
Ĭhatbots are used in dialog systems for various purposes including customer service, request routing, or information gathering. The term "ChatterBot" was originally coined by Michael Mauldin (creator of the first Verbot) in 1994 to describe these conversational programs. Designed to convincingly simulate the way a human would behave as a conversational partner, chatbot systems typically require continuous tuning and testing, and many in production remain unable to adequately converse, while none of them can pass the standard Turing test.
A chatbot or chatterbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent.