Shaman
Member of a tribe reaching altered states of consciousness, interacting with a spirit world during a ritual, and practicing divination, advices, etc.
~Paleolithic
Egyptian Oracles
An oracle was a request to a deity to answer by yes or no some practical question through its public statue.
~1500 BC
Pythia
Was a priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi who served as the oracle.
~800 BC
Ars Magna
Ramon Llull
A paper machine operated by rotating concentrically arranged circles to combine a symbolic alphabet, in order to show all possible truth about the subject of inquiry.
1305
Talking Heads
Abbé Mical
Created two talking heads and presented them to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris.
1783
Turing Test
Alan Turing
His article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" introduced what is now called the Turing test as a criterion of intelligence.
1950
Eliza
Joseph Weizenbaum
Creation at MIT the first chatterbot simulating a Rogerian psychotherapist, also called Doctor.
1966
HAL-9000
Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Clarke
The imaginary computer character in Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001 - a Space Odyssey influenced many researchers.
1968
Parry
Kenneth Colby
Simulated a person with paranoid schizophrenia, also described as Eliza with an attitude.
1972
Jabberwacky
Rollo Carpenter
Initialy developed on a Sinclair ZX81, its stated aim was to "simulate natural human chat in an interesting, entertaining and humorous manner".
1981
PC Therapist
Joseph Weintraub
An Eliza-like chatbot using a Woody Allen type humour and helpful tone; it won four Loebner Prize contests including the first one in 1991.
1986
Loebner Prize
Hugh Loebner
An annual Turing-test like competition that awards prizes to the chatterbot considered by the judges to be the most human-like.
1990
Dr. Sbaitso
Creative Labs
An Eliza-like speech synthesis program for MS DOS-based personal computers.
1991
Chatterbot
Michael Mauldin
The term "ChatterBot" was originally coined by Michael Mauldin when creating the Verbot (Verbal-Robot) and an AI SDK for Windows.
1994
Infobot
Kevin Lenzo
A Perl IRC bot which remembers URLs and associates them with a descriptive name, so whenever someone needed a specific URL they could ask the bot.
1995
Albert One
Robby Garner
A multifaceted bots composed of several subsystems, including a version of Eliza, working together in a hierarchical arrangement; It won the Loebner Prize in 1998 and 1999.
1995
A.L.I.C.E.
Richard Wallace
Means (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) also referred to as Alicebot; Based on a language called AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language); It won Loebner Prize in 2000, 2001 and 2004.
1995
Hex
Jason Hutchens
Based on Eliza, this chatterbot won the Loebner Prize that year.
1996
MegaHall
Jason Hutchens
Popular due to its humorous nature, it has been known to respond with twisted or nonsensical statements that are often amusing; It learns as the conversation progresses, remembering new words and sentence structures.
1998
Smarterchild
ActiveBuddy
Available on AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger networks, providing instant access to news, weather, stock information, movie times, yellow pages listings, etc.
2001
Eugene Goostman
Vladimir Veselov, Eugene Demchenko, Sergey Ulasen
A virtual 13-year-old Ukrainian boy known for its grammatical errors and lack of general knowledge.
2001
SitePal
Oddcast
Allows to deploy AIML-based "virtual employees" on websites that can welcome visitors, guide them around the site and answer questions.
2002
Virtuoz
Alexandre Lebrun, Callixte Cauchois, Laurent Landowski
This French company has developed numerous CRM virtual assistant applications, and has been acquired by Nuance in 2013.
2002
Eva
Jean-Claude Heudin
Eva is a multi-agent prototype for research on a "schizophrenic architecture" and used for few applications with advanced CGI and 3D animated avatars.
2002
SimSimi
ISMaker
Named from a Korean word which means "bored", it has led to controversy and protests in Thailand for some of its responses containing profanity and criticisms of leading politicians.
2002
Jabberwock
Juergen Pirner
Inspired from Lewis Carroll's poem of the same name, won the Loebner Prize.
2003
George
Rollo Carpenter
A character named George within Jabberwacky, won the Loebner Prize.
2005
Mitsuku
Steve Worswick
A 18-year-old female chatbot based on AIML available as a flash game under the username "Pandorabots"; It won the 2013 and 2016 Loebner prizes.
2005
Joan
Rollo Carpenter
Another Jabberwacky character named Joan, won the Loebner Prize.
2006
Watson
David Ferrucci
An IBM computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language initialy developed for the game Jeopardy!
2006
Ms Dewey
McCann-Erickson and EVB
Ms Dewey was an interactive search assistant based on more than 600 videos designed for a viral marketing operation for Microsoft.
2006
Ultra Hal Assistant
Zabaware
A personal assistant based on the WordNet lexical dictionary with animated characters using speech recognition and synthesis; It won the 2007 Loebner Prize.
2007
Cleverbot
Rollo Carpenter
A new variant of Jabberwacky, more fuzzy and with deeper context; Responses are not pre-programmed but learned through millions of accumulated interactions.
2008
@Trackgirl
Gregg Marra
A Python script to infiltrate a group of runners on Twitter.
2008
Jeeney AI
C. J. Jones
Developed since 2007 and named "Best Overall Bot" in the 2009 Chatterbox Challenge, after being the "Best New Entry" in the previous year.
2009
Siri
Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer, Chris Brigham
An intelligent personal assistant launched by SRI as an iPhone app and then integrated as a part of Apple's iOS.
2010
Watson wins Jeopardy!
IBM
Watson competed against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings and received the first place prize of $1 million.
2011
Angie
XbrainSoft
A personal assistant initaly developed for Windows Mobile and then optimized for cars using voice interaction for a safer road.
2012
Google Now
An intelligent personal assistant available as an app for Android, iOS and through Google Search when using the Chrome web-browser.
2012
Turing 100
Vladimir Veselov
A contest marking the 60th anniversary of Turing's death; Kevin Warwick considered Eugene Goostmann to have passed Turing's test, although the validity of his claim was disputed by critics.
2014
Alexa
Amazon
An intelligent personal assistant available on devices such as Amazon Echo and capable of voice interaction, making to-do lists, setting alarms, providing weather, traffic, music, and other information.
2015
Cortana
Microsoft
An intelligent personal assistant for Windows 10 and other Microsoft platforms capable of setting reminders, recognizing natural voice and answering questions using information from the Bing search engine.
2015
M
An intelligent personal assistant for Messenger that completes tasks and finds information; "powered by AI that's trained and supervised by people".
2016
ViV
Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham
An intelligent personal assistant by the makers of Siri, which can handle more complex queries and accommodate external plug-ins written to work with the assistant.
2016
Tay
Microsoft
A Twitter bot named after the acronym "thinking about you" simulating a 19-year-old American girl; @TayandYou was shut down only 16 hours after its launch because of politically incorrect tweets.
2016
Jarvis
Mark Zuckerberg
A prototype of a home virtual assistant named after the Jarvis character (Just A Rather Very Intelligent System) from Marvel's movies Iron Man.
2016
CES 2017
Conversational agents such as Amazon's Alexa are on every booth at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas.
2017