Monday, July 16, 2012

A little history: Chatterbots and Conversive

A little history for all you Chatterbot fans:

  • 1966 - Joseph Weizenbaum developed the original chatterbot, ELIZA. 
  • 1994 - Dr. Michael ("Fuzzy") Mauldin, Founder of Lycos, Inc., developed a prototype chatterbot, Julia. 
  • 1997 - Dr. Mauldin and Peter Plantec formed Virtual Personalities, Inc. to create viable NLP solutions for companies. 
  • 2000 – Sylvie - The first Verbally Enhanced Software Robot - or, Verbot was released. 
  • 2001 – Virtual Personalities, Inc. became Conversive, Inc. to reflect the focus on providing Customer Service and Marketing Solutions to the Enterprise. 
  • 2003 – Conversive’s Application Platform version 5 (CAP5) released. 
  • 2004 – Verbot desktop version 4 is released for the enthusiast community. 
  • 2006 – Verbot Online version released: let your website visitors chat with your bot! 
  • 2007 – Conversive Live Automation released, seamlessly integrates live web chat with the power of Conversive’s proven automation technologies. 
  • 2009 – Verbot desktop version 5 released, fully featured Free version.
  • 2012 - Verbot Online version ends.
  • 2012 - Verbots (through Conversive) are acquired by Avaya, Inc. 
  • 2014 - Verbots.com, Community forums accidently but permanently shutdown. 

1 comment:

  1. Actually "Julia" was created in 1991...

    --Michael Mauldin, Adjunct Research Computer Scientist, CMU

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