In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum created Eliza, a program that set out to create a parody of a conversation between a therapist and his patient in their initial phase. In it, an exchange of simple questions that do not require great emotional depth takes place. In the following screenshot, a simple Eliza chatbot is shown:
Eliza relies on the use of regular expressions to transform user input into its outputs, so as to give continuity to the conversation as well as apparent consistency. At other times, it produces no contextual observations but stuff that is perfectly in line with the attitude of a psychotherapist, such as very interesting ...
