A Very Brief History of Chatbots

"It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?"

You're sitting in front of your bulky monitor. You’ve dialed up to connect to the Internet. You're trying to navigate the labyrinth of Microsoft Word, wrestling with stubborn formatting errors as your deadline looms. Out of nowhere, Clippy springs into action, eager to assist you. Its timing was usually off, its help often unneeded, and yet when you actually needed assistance, it was conspicuously absent.

This notoriously bad chatbot greeted millions of Windows users with more interruptions than assistance throughout the late '90s and early 2000s. The small, animated paperclip with googly eyes and an endearing enthusiasm for administrative task was ineffective… at best.

Despite its shortcomings, Clippy was a harbinger of what was to come—a primitive example of a future where machines could understand and interact with us. Clippy was a promise of what was just over the horizon, a technology whose time had not yet come.

I want t…