The Origins of Chatbots

While Chatbots appear to be a new phenomenon in our digital world, there has been a long developmental history behind this technology, dating back to Alan Turing in the 1950’s.

Turing wrote a paper called, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", which discussed the concept of whether machines could ‘think’. To do this he developed a test called the "Imitation Game", which set out a simple criterion for machine intelligence: if a human engages in a dialogue with a machine and cannot distinguish whether the machine is human or not, then the machine has intelligence.

This paper set in motion a challenge for AI designers and In 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum developed a software program called ELIZA that appeared to pass the Turing test (Imitation Game).

Over the decades since, research and development in AI continued to progress with such chatbot iterations as PARRY (1972), Jabberwacky (1988), A.L.I.C.E.(1995), Watson (2006) and Siri (2010). With the rise of internet chatrooms in the 1990’s, chatbots emerged as a useful component of internet-based communication (Colace et al, 2018).

Learn More:

Look at the brief history of chatbot development by scrolling through the timeline on the left.

View the video history below.

To dig deeper into this history, check out Dylan Avalverde’s article ‘A Brief History of Chatbots’.

Google Sites

Report abuse