In place of direct communication with a live human agent, a chatbot or chatterbot is a software application that conducts an online chat conversation using text or text-to-speech. Chatbot systems are often designed to accurately replicate the way a human would behave as a conversational partner, although many in production are still unable to speak adequately, and none of them can pass the traditional Turing test. Michael Mauldin (developer of the first Verbot) coined the term "ChatterBot" to describe these conversational systems in 1994.
In dialogue systems, chatbots are used for a variety of reasons, including customer support, request routing, and information collection. While some chatbots make heavy use of word classification, natural language processing, and advanced AI, others just scan for basic keywords and generate responses using common phrases from a library or database.
