Chatbots are one of the many services provided by Eden AI and in this day and age, they are quickly becoming more popular amongst users and businesses alike. This awareness has increased with the growing popularity of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Chatbots are used in various industries and for many reasons and are now part of the ways consumers reach out to businesses and engage with them. While they are just becoming more popular, chatbots have been around since the mid-1960s.
What Is A Chatbots
Simply put, a chatbot is an AI program that chats to you. They have the ability to chat with users and can be used as a personal assistant, to replicate strong user interactions, to support business processes, to gather information from big groups, etc. Search engines use chatbots to lag the web and archive new pages for later searches. They assist various individuals or groups in putting their inquiries into text or voice messages.
History of Chatbots
ELIZA
ELIZA was the very first chatbot and was created by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966 and it uses pattern matching and substitution methodology to simulate conversation. The program was designed in a way that it mimics human conversation and worked by passing the words that users entered into a computer and then pairing them to a list of possible scripted responses. It was so great that users were confiding in it their most personal thoughts. In the decades that followed, chatbot makers have built upon Weizenbaum’s model to strive for more human-like interactions. With the goal of passing the Turing test which is difficult due to the infinite possibilities of human conversations.
PARRY
PARRY was constructed by American psychiatrist Kenneth Colby in 1972 to imitate a patient with schizophrenia in an attempt to simulate the disease. It is a natural language program that resembles the thinking of an individual. It works with a complicated system of assumptions, attributions, and “emotional responses” triggered by changing weights assigned to verbal inputs and was tested using a variation of the Turing test to validate the work.
Jabberwacky
The chatbot was created by developer Rollo Carpenter in 1988 and aimed to simulate a natural human conversation in an entertaining way. Jabberwacky has led to other technological growth and some individuals use it for academic research purposes through its webpage since its origin. The chatbot is considered to use an AI method called “contextual pattern matching.”
Dr. Sbaitso
Dr. Sbaitso is a chatbot created by Creative Labs for MS-Dos in 1992 and is one of the earliest efforts of incorporating A.I. and is the first full voice operated chat program. The program would converse with the user as if it was a psychologist with simple replies like “Why do you feel that way?” rather than complicated interaction.
A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity)
A.L.I.C.E. is a universal language processing chatbot that uses heuristic pattern matching to carry conversations and was pioneered by Richard Wallace in 1995. In 1998, the program was edited in Java, and in 2001 Wallace printed an AIML specification and other developers drafted free and open sources of ALICE in different programming languages and a variety of foreign languages from there. The program simulates chatting with a real person over the Internet and is a young-looking woman in human years and tells a user her age, hobbies and other fascinating facts, as well as answering to the user’s dialog.
Siri
Siri was formed by Apple for iOS in 2010 and was an intelligent personal assistant and learning navigator that uses a natural language UI and paved the system for all AI bots and PAs after that. It was described as a new Apple service where users could make inquiries and conversation with Siri through Messages that could perform current duties without the user having to chat aloud and could reply to a text, audio, images, and video when transferred to it by the user.
Google Now/Google Assistant
Google Now was launched at Google Inch in 2012 and answers questions, performs actions through requests made to a set of web services and makes recommendations. Google Now was initially a way to get contextually appropriate information based on location and time of the day and evolved to become much more complicated and elaborate, with a broad range of content categories delivered on cards sometimes referred to us as predictive search.
Cortana
Cortana was first demonstrated at Microsoft’s Build 2014 developer conference, and it became directly integrated into both Windows phone devices and Windows 10 PCs. This program uses voice recognition and relevant algorithms to get and respond to voice commands. Cortana can perform tasks like reminders, send emails and texts, create and manage lists, chit-chat, and play games, find facts, files, locations, and info among others.
Alexa
Alexa is an intelligent personal assistant developed by Amazon in 2014 and is now built into devices such as the Amazon Echo, the Echo Dot, the Echo Show and more. There is also an Alexa app and more devices from third-party manufacturers that have Alexa built in to them. Using nothing but the sound of your voice, you can search the Web, play music, create to-do or shopping lists, set alarms, stream podcasts, play audiobooks, get news or weather reports, control your smart-home products and more.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a large language model trained by OpenAI. It was founded by the OpenAI team in 2021. It is designed to assist users in generating human-like text based on given input. ChatGPT can be used for a variety of tasks, including conversation generation and language translation. The model is trained on a massive amount of data, allowing it to generate text, problem solve in code, and complete new information without having prior knowledge on the topic. It is often difficult to distinguish from text written by a human.
That is a short history of chatbots and if you have any questions about chatbots or Conversational AI, or would like to discuss specific use cases for your business, don’t hesitate to contact us. Contact us @helloworld@edenai.co.za and we will help you grow.
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