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From Eliza to ChatGPT: why people spent 60 years building chatbots
Talking to your computer has always been the future of computers — now it’s the present.
Weizenbaum wrote in an academic journal in 1966 that Eliza “makes certain kinds of natural language conversation between man and computer possible.” He set up the bot to act as a therapist, a vessel into which people could pour their problems and thoughts. The tech behind Eliza was incredibly primitive: users typed into a text field, and the bot selected from a bunch of predefined responses based on the keywords in your question. There have been people working on that, too: a group at Xerox PARC in the 1970s built a chatbot you could use to book plane tickets, but it was finicky and slow and wildly expensive to run.
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