Back when texts cost 50 cents to send and receive, and people paid for Internet by the minute, AOL Instant Messenger was what the cool kids used to keep in touch. Armed with awesome screen names ...

In 2000, I founded SmarterChild, the world’s first commercial instant messaging bot. SmarterChild had 30 million people in his IM buddy list, making it the most popular artificially intelligent agent ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. In our eighth grade classroom, her name was Hanna. On AOL Instant Messenger, she was Banana3017. I was in love with both. At ...

If you’re a millennial, chances are you remember AIM’s SmarterChild, an “intelligent” chatbot that simulated human conversation. Sound familiar? Nowadays, ChatGPT’s AI-infused chatbot is all the rage, ...

Far before there was ChatGPT, there was SmarterChild, an instant message chatbot whose encyclopedic knowledge and quick wit could put Google to shame. Thirty million people added SmarterChild to their ...

Robert Hoffer today kicked off MobileBeat 2016 with a strong call to action: “If you’re going to make bots today, give them personality. Brands have a soul, and their bots should have a soul too.” ...

The critically unloved 1999 film Bicentennial Man seems like an odd turning point in the evolution of chatbots, but for Robert Hoffer, Robin Williams’s performance as an intelligent robot was an ...

Surely you remember SmarterChild, the bot you spent far more hours than you’d like to admit chatting with on AOL Instant Messenger. The beauty of SmarterChild, as Fast Company‘s Jared Newman writes, ...

An automated answer service that piggybacked on AOL Instant Messenger has fallen victim to its own success. SmarterChild, a so-called bot that predicted the weather, gave dictionary definitions, asked ...