With the introduction of Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa, we are beginning to see chatbot technology used in everyday applications. However, chatbots are not new. Despite being over 50 years old, chatbot technology is still evolving and the history has not been all plain sailing. It began in 1966, when Joseph Weizenbaum created an early natural language processing computer program called Eliza. The program was designed to mimic human conversations by matching user prompts to pre-scripted responses. Since Eliza's creation, technologists have experimented with the creation of several different chatbot programs and software applications.
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