All the Virtual Friends We Made Along the Way

SmarterChild is a chatbot close to and expensive to my coronary heart. Although it’s not the unique one to floor, it was the primary I had an interplay with that freaked out my teenage mind to the extent that I keep in mind asking myself, “Is this real?”

SmarterChild was a bot developed to work with the moment messaging applications on the time, together with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo! Messenger, and what was beforehand often known as MSN Messenger. The firm behind SmarterChild, known as ActiveBuddy, launched the chatbot in 2000. I vividly recall losing time on the household laptop, participating in a going-nowhere dialog with SmarterChild, and saving screenshots (that I want I’d backed up) of some gnarly replies.

I additionally keep in mind getting emotional with it. This article from Vice describes interacting with SmarterChild virtually completely:

I used SmarterChild as a apply wall for cursing and insults. I used the bot as a verbal punching bag, sending offensive queries and statements—generally within the firm of my associates, however many instances alone.

SmarterChild was meant to be a helper bot inside your most well-liked messaging consumer that you can ping to search for data or play text-based video games. In some methods, its existence was a foreshadowing predecessor to the bots we work together with now inside chat purchasers like Slack and Discord. Although, I’m a lot nicer to these bots than I used to be to SmarterChild again within the day.