A Little History

My name is Rebecca Peltz. I've been working with data and developing software since 1981. When I was 11 years old, in the late 1960s, my Dad, who was working as a programmer for the Rand Corporation in California, took me to work.

He loaded a tape drive with a large magnetic tape and explained he was loading a game.

The game was named Eliza, and he told me it was a psychiatrist I could talk to. He said it would listen to what I said and then often repeat it back to me in a question. I didn't actually "talk" to Eliza. Instead, I typed what I had to say on a teletype. The psychiatrist responded on the teletype, which provided a transcript of our conversation.

The image below shows the transcript of my conversation with Dr. Otto Matic, as the psychiatrist called himself. I wasn't too impressed with our conversation, but I was impressed by the fact that what I said prompted a response indicating some understanding on the other end.

From Eliza to Eleanor

Joseph Weizenbaum created the first chatbot in 1966. He named it Eliza after the character Eliza in Pygmalion. Eliza uses language to improve her social standing in George Bernard Shaw's play.

The Eliza bot was modeled after Rogerian therapy, in which the therapist often restates the patient's own words. This worked well for Eliza because the technology used pattern matching to create a response for the patient, providing an illusion of understanding.

Once I understood the nature of what we now know as AI, I was interested in creating a more sophisticated version of Eliza, and I'm calling her Eleanor in this application. There is no "Dr. Otto Mattic" necessary to front for this female digital therapist.

Due to the problems that can arise in an online chat, whether with a bot or in Social Media, I decided to create an Admin character who is responsible for checking for banned words that could lead to a problematic discussion. I used some of the words I found in a list of banned words from a blog about Midjourney's banned words and, of course,George Carlin's 7 words you can neve say on TV.

Digital Conversation

The Session page provides a user interface for creating and saving a conversation. The art of programming a Conversation User Interface (CUI) has been developing for over a decade. It is available in the form of voice and visual bots. In this application, the conversation is made available via a transcript. The Client input is expandable. The image below shows the entire Gettysburg Address in the input. Drag the little triangle in the bottom right corner to expand the viewable input. The image below shows the basic client functionality.