Chatterbots

Abstract

A survey of chatterbots is presented along with their brief background including their emergence, description of the first programs of this type and some of their modern commercial and educational applications.

A Chatterbot is a computer program that is designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users.

To put it more simply, this is a program that, ideally, “communicates” with a person on an equal footing; it somehow analyzes human cue words or phrases and gives appropriate reasonable responses. Such programs are also called virtual agents or chatbots (from the term “ChatterBot,” which was originally coined by Michael Mauldin in 1997). In the general case, these may be systems that recognize and reproduce both written and oral speech, although sound recognition is a separate problem that is beyond the scope of our current consideration; further it will be assumed that the programs we deal with have a character interface.