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The Verbot (Verbal-Robot) was a popular [1] chatbot program and artificial intelligence software development kit (SDK) for Windows and web.
Virtual Personalities, Inc. traces its technology back to Michael Mauldin's work as a graduate student and post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and its artistry back to Peter Plantec's work in personality psychology and art direction.
In 1994, Michael Loren Mauldin, founder of Lycos, Inc., developed a prototype chatbot, Julia, which competed in the internationally known Turing test, for the coveted Loebner Prize. The Turing test matches computer scientist judges against machines to see if they can distinguish a computer from a real human. Julia was refined and developed, and in 1997, Dr. Mauldin and Peter Plantec, a clinical psychologist and animator, formed Virtual Personalities, Inc. (now Conversive, Inc.) in order to create a virtual human interface that would incorporate real-time animation as well as speech and natural language processing. The initial release, a stand-alone virtual person called Sylvie, was beta-tested to the public. This release was well received, and finally, after several versions, the production release (deemed version 3) of the Verbally Enhanced Software Robot, or Verbot, was deployed in fall 2000.
The Virtual Personalities story goes back to 1978, where Mauldin was attending Rice University. Fascinated by the idea of ELIZA, he proceeded to write a program called "PET" for his 8 kilobyte Commodore PET Computer. PET included simple induction as a way to post new information, for example:[ citation needed ]
Subject: I like my friend (later) Subject: I like food. PET: I have heard that food is your friend.
Meanwhile, Plantec was separately designing a personality for "Entity", a theoretical virtual human that would interact comfortably with humans without pretending to be one. At that time the technology was not advanced enough to realize Entity. Mauldin got so involved with this that he majored in Computer Science and minored in Linguistics.
In the late seventies and early eighties, a popular computer game at universities was Rogue, an implementation of Dungeons and Dragons where the player would descend 26 levels in a randomly created dungeon, fighting monsters, gathering treasure, and searching for the elusive "Amulet of Yendor". Mauldin was one of four grad students who devoted a large amount of time to building a program called "Rog-O-Matic" capable of retrieving the amulet and emerging victorious from the dungeon[ citation needed ].
In 1989, when James Aspnes at Carnegie Mellon created the first TinyMUD (a descendant of MUD and AberMUD), Mauldin was one of the first to create a computer player that would explore the text-based world of TinyMUD. But his first robot, Gloria, gradually accreted more and more linguistic ability, to the point that it could pass the "unsuspecting" Turing test. In this version of the test, the human has no reason to suspect that one of the other occupants of the room is controlled by a computer, and so is more polite and asks fewer probing questions. The second generation of Mauldin's TinyMUD robots was Julia, created on Jan. 8, 1990. Julia slowly developed into a more and more capable conversational agent, and assumed useful duties in the TinyMUD world, including tour guide, information assistant, note-taker, and message-relayer. She could even play the card game hearts along with the other human players.
In 1991, Julia attended the first Loebner Prize contest in Boston, Massachusetts. Although she only finished third, she was ranked by one judge as more human than one of the human confederates, winning a coveted certificate of humanness in the world's first restricted Turing test [ citation needed ].
Julia continued to log in to various TinyMUD's and TinyMucks for the next seven years, and chatted with hundreds of people a month over the internet.
Julia's job was to explore a virtual world consisting of pages of textual descriptions, with links between them, and to construct an internal map of that world and answer questions about it (including path information such as the shortest route from one room to another, and matching information, such as which rooms contained a certain kind of object or textual description).
It was therefore only a very short cognitive leap from Julia to Lycos, another robotic agent that explores a virtual world made of hyperlinked pages of text, and which answers questions about those pages. Sylvie was born and her abilities were expanded greatly to include interfacing with computers and control systems via her serial ports.
Sylvie was the first intelligent animated virtual human. She was designed both as a conversation agent and as a virtual human interface that would form a bridge between the two. She became more popular as a conversation agent, but her designers believe she serves as a prototype for future virtual human interface design that will help us all cope with the increasing complexity of technology.
As an aside, Plantec noticed that a large number of Sylvies have been sold in Southeast Asia. Upon investigation, he found out that students had discovered a "test" mode that would allow them to type in English sentences that Sylvie would pronounce in her somewhat stylized English.
In 1997, Dr. Mauldin and Peter Plantec formed Virtual Personalities, Inc. to create Natural Language Processing solutions for companies. In 2001 Virtual Personalities, Inc. became Conversive, Inc. to reflect the focus on providing Customer Service and Marketing to the Enterprise Market. In late 2012 Avaya, Inc. acquired Conversive's assets including Verbots. [2]
The Verbot 4 version was created and released in 2004. In 2005 Version 4.1 of the Verbot Software was released with many feature enhancements and bug fixes, including built-in support for embedding C# code in outputs and conditionals. In early 2006 Conversive launched Verbots Online allowing Verbot 4 users to upload their knowledge and show off their bots to the world. In 2009 Version 5 was released, completely free and fully featured. In early 2012 the last version of Verbot, 5.0.1.2, was released to the general public with support for Windows 7. Later in 2012 Verbots Online completely shut down. [3]
Verbots.com, its community of users, and its forums no longer exist, but the software and users can still be found. There has been no active development since the early 2012 release of Verbot 5.0.1.2. [4]
Verbot Permanently Shutdown
ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from 1964 to 1967 at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to explore communication between humans and machines, ELIZA simulated conversation by using a pattern matching and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program, but had no representation that could be considered really understanding what was being said by either party. Whereas the ELIZA program itself was written (originally) in MAD-SLIP, the pattern matching directives that contained most of its language capability were provided in separate "scripts", represented in a lisp-like representation. The most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a psychotherapist of the Rogerian school, and used rules, dictated in the script, to respond with non-directional questions to user inputs. As such, ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots and one of the first programs capable of attempting the Turing test.
In computer science, the ELIZA effect is the tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — into computer programs that have a textual interface. The effect is a category mistake that arises when the program's symbolic computations are described through terms such as "think", "know" or "understand."
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The Loebner Prize was an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awarded prizes to the computer programs considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The format of the competition was that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge simultaneously held textual conversations with a computer program and a human being via computer. Based upon the responses, the judge would attempt to determine which was which.
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Robby Garner is an American natural language programmer and software developer. He won the 1998 and 1999 Loebner Prize contests with the program called Albert One. He is listed in the 2001 Guinness Book of World Records as having written the "most human" computer program.
Albert One is an artificial intelligence chatbot created by Robby Garner and designed to mimic the way humans make conversations using a multi-faceted approach in natural language programming.
A.L.I.C.E., also referred to as Alicebot, or simply Alice, is a natural language processing chatterbot—a program that engages in a conversation with a human by applying some heuristical pattern matching rules to the human's input. It was inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum's classical ELIZA program.
Fred, or FRED, was an early chatbot written by Robby Garner.
Michael Loren "Fuzzy" Mauldin is an American retired computer scientist and the inventor of the Lycos web search engine.
Artificial stupidity is a term used within the field of computer science to refer to a technique of "dumbing down" computer programs in order to deliberately introduce errors in their responses.
A virtual assistant (VA) is a software agent that can perform a range of tasks or services for a user based on user input such as commands or questions, including verbal ones. Such technologies often incorporate chatbot capabilities to simulate human conversation, such as via online chat, to facilitate interaction with their users. The interaction may be via text, graphical interface, or voice - as some virtual assistants are able to interpret human speech and respond via synthesized voices.
The computer game bot Turing test is a variant of the Turing test, where a human judge viewing and interacting with a virtual world must distinguish between other humans and video game bots, both interacting with the same virtual world. This variant was first proposed in 2008 by Associate Professor Philip Hingston of Edith Cowan University, and implemented through a tournament called the 2K BotPrize.
Eugene Goostman is a chatbot that some regard as having passed the Turing test, a test of a computer's ability to communicate indistinguishably from a human. Developed in Saint Petersburg in 2001 by a group of three programmers, the Russian-born Vladimir Veselov, Ukrainian-born Eugene Demchenko, and Russian-born Sergey Ulasen, Goostman is portrayed as a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy—characteristics that are intended to induce forgiveness in those with whom it interacts for its grammatical errors and lack of general knowledge.
The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation was a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel, such as a computer keyboard and screen, so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator could not reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine would be said to have passed the test. The test results would not depend on the machine's ability to give correct answers to questions, only on how closely its answers resembled those a human would give. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the verbal version generalizes naturally to all of human performance capacity, verbal as well as nonverbal (robotic).
Bruce Wilcox is an artificial intelligence programmer.