What is a Chatbot? An Introduction to the Latest Trend

It would not be fair to talk about the history of chatbots without mentioning Alan Turing and Joseph Weizenbaum. These men imagined computers talking like humans and, in 1950, had the foresight to develop a test to see if a person could distinguish human from machine: the Turing Test. In 1966 a computer program called ELIZA was invented by Weizenbaum. It imitated the language of a psychotherapist from only 200 lines of code. You can still talk with it here: Eliza.