Chatbots - A Brief History

Only recently have chatbots become a regular part of the way consumers reach out to businesses and engage with them in hopes of getting questions answered, orders placed, and business done. However, you may be surprised to learn that chatbots have been around since the mid-1960s. That said, chatbots have only advanced in intelligent thinking and execution within the last decade. Chatbots are finally being recognized for their “intelligence” – their ability to engage and interact intuitively with human users.

Blogs upon blogs have been written, contesting whether chatbots truly are intelligent, so this blog will not try to do the same. Instead, it will shed light on the history of chatbots and what it has meant for Botsplash, a SaaS company with a chatbot service. A history of chatbots provides the scope needed to understand its technology, where it began, where it went, and where it is going. This, in turn, will segue into a discussion of the influences the history of chatbots have had on the Botsplash chatbot.

In 1966, the world’s first chatterbot program - a computer program designed to interact with people by simulating human conversation - was created at the Artificial Intelligence (AI) laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by Joseph Weizenbaum. The chatterbot program ELIZA – named after Eliza Doolittle, one of the main characters from George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion – was created to simulate human conversations using pre-programmed responses. ELIZA examined keywords received as user input, and then it triggered ELIZA’s preprogrammed output, based on a defined set of rules. It did not possess a framework for understanding the contexts of conversations and answered inquiries only by analyzing the prompts a user entered.

AI was still very much in its infancy. Even sixteen years after English computer scientist and pioneer Alan Turning wrote a paper in 1950 about testing a computing machine’s thought and hypothesized that it could have a fluid conversation with a human being, the AI in ELIZA was rudimentary at best. AI, chatterbot technology, and the realm of digital communication would still have to wait for its moment. It would not be until the 1980s that private and public sector research on AI and chatterbot technology would resume in the U.S. In fact, what is now known as the “The Winter of AI” from 1974 to 1980 is what led to the rejuvenation of interest in these fields in the U.S.

The “Winter of AI” in the early 1980s was deemed the genesis for Expert Systems – computational systems that simulated the ability of humans with special skill sets to make decisions. These systems introduced ways for businesses to automate certain processes, provide savings in certain areas of expenditures, and integrate with commercial and retail industries. However, these systems were marred by slow development and maintenance, which led to failures and increased disinterest in those technologies. The “Second Winter of AI” commenced and, yet again, the technologies would be stymied by lackluster research and investments from 1987 to 1993.

This “Second Winter of AI” did however spur a greater response from researchers and industries to reinstate interests and investments in AI technologies than the First Winter did and the 1990s introduced a new focus of AI – creating an “intelligent agent.” This represented a system or program that would be able to perform numerous tasks which could be translated into online shopping, web search, and more. This new focus, coupled with the increasing developments in cybernetics and neural networks, made for an AI-renaissance in the 1990s. During this time, Michael Mauldin, a computer scientist, coined the term “chatbot”, having drawn inspiration from Joseph Weizenbaum’s “chatterbot.”

Richard Wallace, another prominent computer scientist, was also inspired by the work of Joseph Weizenbaum and developed his chatterbot program A.L.I.C.E (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) in 1995. This chatterbot program won the prestigious Loebner prize three times for being considered the most human-like chatbot of its time, but it never did pass the Turing test of being able to think as intelligently as humans. Still, chatbots were coming of age in the 1990s and started to present serious capabilities for consumer-driven interactions on the already popularly growing World Wide Web. In 1997, the Jabberwacky chatbot (initially created back in 1981) was launched on the Internet by English computer scientist Rollo Carpenter. It would become more consumer-friendly in a more consumer-friendly variation in 2008 under the name Cleverbot, continuing its purpose of simulating natural human chat in entertaining ways.

By the end of the 1990s, chatbot technologies were seen as a permanent fixture in online communication, retail, and business. What began as simple programs designed to carry basic conversation based on command prompts were now becoming advanced computation systems, natural processing languages, and artificial intelligence. Chatbots could now not only carry on a conversation with a human consumer, but also facilitate the conversation and add substance to it.

Botsplash, with the chatbot it offers, envisions a chatbot software that provides ways for consumers and businesses to engage with one another seamlessly. When Botsplash first sowed its seeds in the industry of digital communication and customer engagement in 2017, its chatbot offered ways for both consumers and enterprises to fully express their needs and desires.

Botsplash’s chatbot is customizable, allowing enterprises to provide their consumers with several unique options before initiating a conversation with a live agent. The chatbot utilized automation to provide consumers with a hybrid experience of automated, logic-driven chatbot conversing and live agent chat. While Botsplash’s chatbot stands on the shoulders of the chatbot giants that have been examined in this blog, it aspires to be the next great chatbot of the present and into the future, carrying on the tradition of engaging machines with humans in the area of digital communication.

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