AllYouCanTech

The Downfall of a Previously Favored AI Chatbot

ChatGPT, Grok, and comparable AI applications have experienced remarkable popularity in recent years; however, chatbots have existed for a considerable time — dating back to the 90s. Many of those chatbots have faded into obscurity, such as Microsoft’s Tay from 2016. Yet, a chatbot that was hugely favored in its prime, which hardly anyone utilizes today, is A.L.I.C.E. It is a fitting moment to revisit the evolution of the technology, particularly with entities like DuckDuckGo launching more well-known AI chatbots online and rendering them more available than ever before.

Commonly known as Alicebot, the acronym signifies Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity. It was introduced in November 1995 — three decades ago. Naturally, “alive” is a misleading term to describe it since Alice was merely a rudimentary natural language chatbot incapable of passing the Turing test. The bot utilized what is known as heuristic pattern matching to interpret and reply to human input. In simpler terms, the bot scans through established data patterns to effectively locate a match for inquiries and, in this context, to provide appropriate replies. Although not operational today, the open-source code can be downloaded from either the ALICE AI Foundation on Google Code or Richard Wallace’s GitHub. An Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) interpreter is necessary to execute the application, which likely clarifies its diminished usage on a larger scale. Spike Jonze acknowledges A.L.I.C.E. as an influence for the 2016 movie “Her,” which depicted a human — portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix — developing feelings for a digital chatbot.