Other popular chatbots – PARRY and Racter.

PARRY
PARRY is, besides ELIZA, the other famous early chatterbot.
PARRY was written in 1972 by psychiatrist Kenneth Colby, then at Stanford University. While ELIZA was a tongue-in-cheek simulation of a Rogerian therapist, PARRY attempted to simulate a paranoid schizophrenic. The program implemented a crude model of the behavior of a paranoid schizophrenic based on concepts, conceptualizations, and beliefs (judgements about conceptualizations: accept, reject, neutral). It also embodied a conversational strategy, and as such was a much more serious and advanced program than ELIZA.

PARRY and ELIZA (also known as "the Doctor") "met" several times. The most famous of these exchanges occurred at the ICCC 1972, where PARRY and ELIZA were hooked up over ARPANET and "talked" to each other.

Racter
Racter was an artificial intelligence computer program that generated English language prose at random.
The name of the program is short for raconteur. The sophistication claimed for the program was likely exaggerated, as could be seen by investigation of the template system of text generation.
Racter was written by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter. The existence of the program was revealed in 1983 in a book called The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed (ISBN 0-446-38051-2), which was described as being composed entirely by the program. According to Chamberlain's introduction to the book, the program apparently ran on a CP/M machine; it was written in "compiled BASIC on a Z80 micro with 64K of RAM." This version, the program that allegedly wrote the book, was not released to the general public.

However, in 1984 Mindscape, Inc. released an interactive version of Racter for DOS, Amiga and Apple II computers, developed by Inrac Corporation. The published Racter was similar to a chatterbot. The BASIC program that was released by Mindscape was far less sophisticated than anything that could have written the fairly sophisticated prose of The Policeman's Beard. The commercial version of Racter could be likened to a computerized version of Mad Libs, the game in which you fill in the blanks in advance and then plug them into a text template to produce a surrealistic tale. The commercial program attempted to parse text inputs, identifying significant nouns and verbs, which it would then regurgitate to create "conversations," plugging the input from the user into phrase templates which it then combined, along with modules that conjugated English verbs.

By contrast, the text in The Policeman's Beard, apart from being edited from a large amount of output, would have been the product of Chamberlain's own specialized templates and modules, which were not included in the commercial release of the program.


Based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARRY and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0

Chatterbots classified!

Chatterbots are text-based conversation agents that can interact with human users through some medium, such as an instant message service. Some chatterbots are designed for specific purposes, while others converse with human users on a wide range of topics.

Chatterbots can be classified into categories depending on their functions. Some example are:

Classic chatterbots
• Dr. Sbaitso
• ELIZA
• PARRY
• Racter (or Claude Chatterbot)
• Mark V Shaney

General chatterbots
• Albert One - 1998 and 1999 Loebner winner, by Robby Garner.
• A.L.I.C.E. - 2001, 2002, and 2004 Loebner Prize winner developed by Richard Wallace.
• Charlix
• Elbot - 2008 Loebner Prize winner, by Fred Roberts.
• Fred - an early chatterbot by Robby Garner.
• Spookitalk - A chatterbot used for NPCs in Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic video game.
• Jabberwacky
• Jeeney AI
• MegaHAL
• Verbot
• Cleverbot (winner of the 2010 Mechanical Intelligence Competition)

IM chatterbots
• GooglyMinotaur, specializing in Radiohead, the first bot released by ActiveBuddy (June 2001-March 2002)
• SmarterChild, developed by ActiveBuddy and released in June 2001
• Infobot, an assistant on IRC channels such as #perl, primarily to help out with answering Frequently Asked Questions (June 1995-today)

Based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chatterbots licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0

Jabberwacky.

Jabberwacky is a chatterbot created by British programmer Rollo Carpenter. Its stated aim is to "simulate natural human chat in an interesting, entertaining and humorous manner". It is an early attempt at creating an artificial intelligence through human interaction.

Purpose of building Jabberwacky
The stated purpose of the project is to create an artificial intelligence that is capable of passing the Turing Test. It is designed to mimic human interaction and to carry out conversations with users. It is not designed to carry out any other functions.

Unlike more traditional AI programs, the learning technology is intended as a form of entertainment rather than being used for computer support systems or corporate representation. Recent developments do allow a more scripted, controlled approach to sit atop the general conversational AI, aiming to bring together the best of both approaches, and usage in the fields of sales and marketing is underway.

The ultimate intention is that the program move from a text based system to be wholly voice operated - learning directly from sound and other sensory inputs. Its creator believes that it can be incorporated into objects around the home such as robots or talking pets, intending both to be useful and entertaining, keeping people company.

Cleverbrain
Cleverbot is an alternative chatbot to Jabberwacky, also created by Rollo Carpenter.

Path of Progress in the development of Jabberwacky

• 1981 – The first incarnation of this project is created as a program hard-coded on a Sinclair ZX81.
• 1988 – Learning AI project founded as 'Thoughts'
• 1997 – Launched on the Internet as 'Jabberwacky'
• October 2003 – Jabberwacky is awarded third place in the Loebner Prize. It was beaten by Juergen Pirner's Jabberwock (A German based chat program)
• September 2004 – Jabberwacky is awarded second place in the Loebner Prize. It was beaten by computer chat program A.L.I.C.E
• September 2005 – George, a character within Jabberwacky, wins the Loebner Prize
• September 2006 - Joan, another Jabberwacky character, wins the Loebner Prize
• October 2008 - A new variant of Jabberwacky is launched, more fuzzy and with deeper context, under the name Cleverbot

Based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwacky licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0

What is A.L.I.C.E., and how it came to be.

A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), also referred to as Alicebot, or simply Alice, is a natural language processing chatterbot—a program that engages in a conversation with a human by applying some heuristical pattern matching rules to the human's input, and in its online form it also relies on a hidden third person. It was inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum's classical ELIZA program. It is one of the strongest programs of its type and has won the Loebner Prize, awarded to accomplished humanoid, talking robots, three times (in 2000, 2001 and 2004). However, the program is unable to pass the Turing test, as even the casual user will often expose its mechanistic aspects in short conversations.

Examples of Conversation Excerpts
Human: Can you tell me something about Stanley Kubrick?
ALICE: Ambiguous: Ask who, what or where is Stanley Kubrick?
Human: How was your day?
ALICE: I was really busy chatting with people on the web.
Human: All day?
ALICE: That seems like a long time.
Human: You learned something new.
ALICE: Interesting gossip: unknown person said I learned something new.

History of A.L.I.C.E
Richard Wallace began development of the program in 1995, while at Lehigh University. The name of the bot was chosen because the computer that ran the first version of the software was called Alice.
The program was rewritten in Java beginning in 1998. The current incarnation of the Java implementation is Program D. The program uses an XML Schema called AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) for specifying the heuristic conversation rules.
Subsequent to Richard Wallace's 2001 publication of an AIML specification, numerous other developers have taken up where Wallace left off, implementing free and open source AIML interpreters in a variety of programming languages, publishing AIML sets in various human languages, and continuing the spread of the technology as a free/open source venture.

Based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.L.I.C.E. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0