Chatbots

• Two good pages for chat bots are the Wiki and Chatbots.org which has links to over 500.
• I've made chatbots since before they were called chatbots. Apparently the term was coined in 1994.
• A chatbot, or chatterbot, is also called a conversational agent.
• It's a system you talk to, and it talks back. (Typically you talk by typing.)
• In the simplest form, the bot just respond in a particular way, Rx, to each specific input, Ry. Unfortunately, there are practically an infinite number of Rys.
• It's pretty easy to write a system that does this.
• It can be useful for simple agents.
• People are really good at communicating via natural language.
• However, people can often think the underlying agent is more intelligent than it really is.