Eliza

ELIZA is a natural language conversation program, also known as a chatbot, created by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 and 1966. Named after Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, ELIZA was designed to mimic a Rogerian psychotherapist. It achieved this by using pre-programmed sentences and simple programming tricks to simulate conversation.12

Weizenbaum chose the therapist role because it allows for a type of dialogue where one participant can appear to know very little about the real world, focusing instead on the speaker's input. This design allowed users to feel heard and understood, attributing insight and reasoning ability to the program. While ELIZA gave an "eerie semblance of intelligent conversation," it did not possess true intelligence. You can still interact with ELIZA at masswerk.at/elizabot.12