Abstract
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.
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Acknowledgment
I thank Prof. P.C.P. Bhatt, Dr. N.Dayasindhu, Prof. R. Govindarajan, and Prof. S.Ramani for reading this article and for their comments that improved it.
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V. Rajaraman is at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Several generations of scientists and engineers in India have learnt computer science using his lucidly written textbooks on programming and computer fundamentals. His current research interests are parallel computing and history of computing.
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Rajaraman, V. From ELIZA to ChatGPT. Reson 28, 889–905 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-023-1620-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-023-1620-6