I look at these fascinations with chatbots, Yandex’s Alice, etc., and recall how I toyed with something similar back in 2003. We had a chat, Starchat.ru, where people constantly hung out and interacted with each other.
I developed the chat, so for fun, I made a bot that you could chat with simply by sending it a private message. It was always online, and not everyone realized that it was a bot. When the robot received a message, it searched the chat logs for messages containing the maximum number of words from the query that also had a response. A response is defined as the next message directed to the user by someone (like “Vasya: go to hell!” being a response to Vasya’s message). When there were multiple options (and there always were), a random one was chosen.
The result was a robot that amusingly responded to questions. If you asked its name, it would always respond with different names, but relevantly, complete with emojis and suffixes. The bot also always provided suitable answers to standard questions like “where do you live” or “how old are you”. Since there was a huge history and people discussed everything in general, it was hard to find a question that the system couldn’t give an interesting/correct/funny answer to.
So, the bot had an interesting side effect. If you started swearing at it offensively, it would swear back even more offensively. And in general, it often reacted inadequately to attacks and reproaches. Simply because in real dialogs, a polite question is answered politely, and a rude one, of course, rudely. The audience had a lot of fun with this bot.
It was especially interesting to read the bot’s own logs later. People there didn’t understand that it was a robot. They asked it questions, argued with it, and made up with it. It was fun.)
Dima Gordy Plugotarenko Sergey Max Nizamov Dmitry Mottl Dmitry Nilov
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 