How Long Have Chatbots Existed?

First Chatbot

In 1951, Alan Turing's "Can machines think? His work (Can machines think?) is seen as the first reference on this subject. The first chatbot is "ELIZA", which was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum, an MIT professor, in 1966. ELIZA was conceived as a psychologist and is intended to create human dialogues. However, since natural language processing and machine learning technologies were not developed enough, at that time, it could only respond with word matching method. The term chatbot was first used as a chatbot by Michael L. Mauldin in 1994.

Today, the fact that existing software and hardware has become competent in collecting and processing data has enabled the fields of natural language processing and machine learning to find real usage areas. The fact that messaging has become a daily communication habit of people has also been an important factor in increasing the interest in chatbots. With the announcement by Facebook of the launch of Facebook Messenger to chatbots in 2016, developers from all over the world focused on this area, and chatbots became popular in terms of both supply and demand.

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