The evolution of chat bots: from darling Eliza to aggressive paranoiac Taya

Hello! Today I want to talk about chat bots - a new trend that is gradually trying to push out mobile apps and social networks.

Recently, it is possible to identify the tendency that the interest of users to communicate in social networks and the use of mobile applications is somewhat dying out, and chat bots are taking the stage, able to weed out mountains of unnecessary information and give exactly the one that interests the user. Chat bot is a personal assistant, a program that knows everything about you and therefore can anticipate desires. She will order plane tickets, pay for pizza delivery, help plan the day and remind you when to congratulate your wife on your wedding anniversary. Virtual interlocutors replace consultants in stores, banks, law offices.
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Chat bots have been around for more than half a century. And I invite you to trace how it all began.
The evolution of chat bots: a brief example

The Eliza program was written by Joseph Weizenbaum back in 1966. She could parody the speech of a psychotherapist, paraphrasing the sentences she was told. In other words, she used the technique of active listening, highlighting keywords in the patient's speech. And if she did not find options for an answer, she said: “I see,” and turned the conversation to another topic.



1972 pleased with another epic development - Parry. This chat bot could mimic the speech of a paranoid schizophrenic and often impersonated himself as a patient. Sometimes he was described as "Eliza with an opinion." Apparently the psychiatrist differs from the schizophrenic only by the absence of this very opinion. In any case, the chat bot was smarter than its predecessor the therapist, as it could deceive professional psychiatrists well. 48% of them did not understand that they communicate with the machine.

Sixteen years after Parry, scientists tried to create a bot with artificial intelligence, and it took them 9 years. Jabberwacky can mimic human conversation in an entertaining way. The bot remembers everything that is told to it, and after that it finds the necessary answer using the context template method. He quickly learns slang, jokes and even forms his own character. By the way, today, robot George helps Russian students to learn English in the project LiveEnglish.

The next important milestone in the development of smart bots was the ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) program, developed in 1995. Who is Alice? This is the first Internet creature that could handle the user's natural speech. It uses the heuristic patterns received from the interlocutor, and due to this it can lead a full-fledged conversation. The Turing test, unfortunately, did not pass, but was repeatedly recognized as the most "human" bot among the existing ones.

2001 laid the foundation for everyone's favorite Siri. It was at this time that the Smarterchild bot appeared , which proved that people are really in a rush to communicate with a smart machine that has its own character and can give good advice. More than 30 thousand AIM and MSN users chatted with the bot.

With the advent of big data, a system was needed that could process, analyze and extract the necessary information. In 2006, IBM began developing Watson . The result was a chat bot capable of processing natural language and learning in the process of communication. He can instantly answer any question, for example, how to open a bank account or what to give his mother for his birthday. Today, an advanced IBM solution manages cognitive information security centers. Watson for Cyber ​​Security includes a chat bot and voice assistant.



Siri is smart and daring - this is the name of Apple’s famous development, which is able to answer questions and perform various tasks on the web. The program appeared 7 years ago and has become a powerful catalyst for developing chatbots with artificial intelligence.

Google Now appeared two years after Siri. The developers have created it for a mobile search engine. A bot from Google can answer questions, give good advice and handle user requests.

In 2015, the famous Alexa from Amazon and Microsoft's Cortana appeared . And in principle, it has already become clear that we have entered the era of chat bots. Smart programs have learned how to recognize human speech, learn, answer all sorts of questions, respond to voice commands, order products for the home and much more.



Well, in 2016 the network was conquered by the famous Tay - a self-learning bot from Microsoft, which was supposed to adopt the style of communication of teenagers. Literally in 16 hours, the bot turned from a cute girl into an aggressive, paranoid-racist who hates the whole world. The project was urgently covered, but memes about it spread throughout the network.

By the way, at the end of this month, one of Microsoft's IT experts in Russia, Dmitry Soshnikov, will tell about the reasons for this behavior of the bot and about new solutions in this direction.

Also last year, Facebook launched the Messenger platform, which allowed developers to create smart bots to contact users. About six weeks after launch, 11 thousand bots were created on the platform. Significant, isn't it?

As you can see, the evolution of chat bots covers 50 years. And now they have gained popularity because a “nutrient medium” has appeared for them - messengers in which some people began to spend more time than in social networks and applications. Today, over 2.5 billion users use instant messengers, and this figure will only increase. Accordingly, the Internet will soon be settled by chat bots and it is quite possible that soon we will not be able to distinguish who we communicate with - with another user or machine.