3. ELIZA – The First Chatbot (1966)
Developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT between 1964 and 1966, ELIZA was an early natural language processing program designed to simulate human conversation. Its most famous script, DOCTOR, emulated a Rogerian psychotherapist by rephrasing users’ statements as questions, creating the illusion of understanding. Despite its simplicity, ELIZA elicited emotional responses from users, highlighting the potential for human-like interactions with machines. This phenomenon, known as the “ELIZA effect,” underscored the psychological impact of conversational agents (en.wikipedia.org).
