How The New, Improved Chatbots Rewrite 50 Years Of Bot History

The critically unloved 1999 film Bicentennial Man seems like an odd turning point in the evolution of chatbots, but for Robert Hoffer, Robin Williams's performance as an intelligent robot was an inspiration. "I wanted to build that, you know?" says Hoffer, a co-creator of the SmarterChild chatbot that lived atop early messaging programs such as AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger. "I wanted to have an intelligence you could talk to on the Internet that would become your best friend for life." Beyond just holding a conversation, SmarterChild wanted to be useful, tapping into web services to provide sports scores, weather forecasts, stocks, and other info. Those ambitions make it an obvious precursor to today's resurgence of chatbots, led by booming startups such as Slack and Kik, and attracting tech giants such as Facebook and Microsoft.