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. In addition, however, chatterbots are often integrated into dialog systems for various practical purposes such as offline help, personalised service, or information acquisition. Some chatterbots use sophisticated natural language processing systems, but many simply scan for keywords within the input and pull a reply with the most matching keywords, or the most similar wording pattern, from a textual database.
The term "ChatterBot" was originally coined by Michael Mauldin (Creator of the first Verbot, Julia) in 1994 to describe these conversational programs.
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