Chatbot

A chatbot is a software application designed to conduct conversation with human users through text or voice interfaces. The concept dates back to 1966 with Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA, a rule-based program at MIT that simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist by pattern-matching keywords and reflecting them back as questions. Early chatbots like ELIZA and ALICE (1995) followed rigid scripts and decision trees, producing convincing but shallow interactions.

Modern AI chatbots are powered by large language models and transformer architectures. Rather than matching keywords to scripted responses, they interpret the semantic meaning behind user queries and generate dynamic, contextually relevant answers. The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 marked a turning point, demonstrating that LLM-based chatbots could hold coherent multi-turn conversations, write code, summarize documents, and reason through complex problems. Competitors including Claude, Gemini, and Grok followed, each building on the transformer paradigm.

The field is now shifting from passive question-answering chatbots toward agentic AI systems that can take actions autonomously. Modern AI agents can trigger workflows, connect with internal tools and APIs, and complete multi-step tasks without human intervention at each step. According to Gartner, over 70% of enterprise conversations are projected to be handled by AI agents rather than traditional chatbots by 2026, reflecting a broader move toward multimodal, autonomous, and tool-using conversational systems.