Читать книгу Bots - Nick Monaco - Страница 21

Chatbots are computer programs that are designed to converse with humans through text or speech (with varying degrees of success). The first chatbot was Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, designed in the 1960s, and chatbots remained popular in MUDs, Usenet and IRC through the 1990s. Popular modern chatbots include the AI assistant systems such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, or Apple’s Siri and the commercial chatbots often used for online customer service.

Most chatbots work in one of two ways. Some use pattern searching and pre-composed responses to simulate conversation; this is how ELIZA operated. Others use more advanced AI techniques, such as fuzzy logic or the generation of dynamic responses based on a database (or “corpus”) of typical responses. The latest chatbots incorporate advanced machine learning techniques to boost dynamic conversational capabilities and approach human-like discourse. In 2020, OpenAI’s GPT-3 bot took chatbots’ conversational abilities to new heights using vast troves of language data and AI techniques to mimic different styles of writing (Economist, 2020). We’ll delve into these techniques more deeply in Chapter 5, Bots and Artificial Intelligence.