https://blog.yellowant.com/the-evolution-of-the-chatterbot-e9f3d0d1d197

Even in the earliest days of the computer, the creators and developers envisioned a future of artificial intelligence for the devices. This is a field where everyone’s always learning, unlearning, relearning, and growing, thus offering innovation opportunities on an everyday basis. From the Turing Test curated by Alan Turing to find whether a computer is able to match the conversational abilities of a human, to Bill Gates’ firm belief that there would come a time in the future where keyboards would be rendered obsolete and we’d get all our work done from conversing with the computer, we’ve always been optimistic of the success of the chatbot. This article is, in part, an exploration of the rise of the chatbot — but more specifically, the utility of chatbots in present day that barely do more than what their name suggests- of bots that can only… chat.

To better understand this, we need to delve a little into the history of these bots. 1966 saw Joseph Weizenbaum create the first ever Chatterbot, as they were called then, known as Eliza. Eliza was a chatbot that acted as a therapist, and interacted with users with open-ended questions based on keywords identified from the users’ sentences. People, for their part, were found to have gotten emotionally attached to Ellie. Having already discussed Chatbots in Therapy, let’s now dive further into the question of why chatbots that we can simply converse with are so popular. What is the driving force behind simulating conversations with a computer that is devoid of any EQ, and how has it benefited people?