From ELIZA to ChatGPT History of Human-Computer Conversation

In 1950, Turing suggested a test to determine whether a computer can exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from that of a human. An aspect of the test was an imaginary conversation between a human and a computer. Since then, computer scientists have designed software to let humans interact with a computer in natural language. The first such program was ELIZA, designed in 1965. After ELIZA, numerous programs (christened Chatbots) have been written to enable humans to converse with computers in natural language. In this article, I describe several of them, including those that orally answer oral questions. I describe the latest program called ChatGPT, developed in late 2022, which has astounded everyone by its ability to answer questions posed in a natural language in any field and converse fluently with humans.