A chatter robot,
chatterbot, chatbot, or chat bot is
a computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods, primarily for engaging in small talk.
The primary aim of such simulation has been to
fool the user into thinking that the program's output has been produced by a human (the Turing test). Programs playing this role are sometimes referred to as
Artificial Conversational Entities, talk bots or chatterboxes.
The notoriety of Turing's proposed test stimulated great interest in Joseph Weizenbaum's program
ELIZA, published in 1975, which
seemed to be able to fool users into believing that they were conversing with a real human.
ELIZA's key method of operation (copied by chatbot designers ever since) involves the recognition of cue words or phrases in the input, and the
output of corresponding pre-prepared or pre-programmed responses that can move the conversation forward in an apparently meaningful way (..).[4]
Thus an
illusion of understanding is generated, even though the processing involved has been merely
superficial.
ELIZA showed that
such an illusion is surprisingly easy to generate, because human judges are so ready to give the benefit of the doubt when conversational responses are capable of being interpreted as "intelligent".
Thus the key technique here—which characterises a program as a chatbot rather than as a serious natural language processing system—is the
production of responses that are sufficiently vague and non-specific that they can be understood as "intelligent" in a wide range of conversational contexts.
The emphasis is typically on vagueness and unclarity, rather than any conveying of genuine information.