25 Years Ago, AOL Launched An AI Chatbot Long Before ChatGPT Or Gemini

Experienced internet users may think of America Online (AOL) and immediately picture swarms of CDs offering hours upon hours of internet service (back when your time online was metered), but the company also helped popularize AI chatbots before its fall from grace. Though in today's time, it's easy to call up chatbots like ChatGPT or Google Gemini and have them complete a variety of tasks, a clever little bot by the name of SmarterChild once helped lead the way.

SmarterChild was a chat buddy that first got its start on messaging apps at the turn of the millennium. Capable of completing certain tasks, folks could have conversations with the bot, though the tools it would implement to generate its answers were a bit different from the bots of today. While its time was short on the internet, its sarcastic tone entertained and helped millions, and it helped set the stage for today's chatbots.

In a 2023 interview with TechCrunch, the co-founder of the company behind SmarterChild, Peter Levitan, stated, "When you talked to SmarterChild, it knew who you were when you came back. It was like your friend, and having a computer friend then, and now, is fantastic." Long before bots like ChatGPT added new features to improve your productivity, SmarterChild was entertaining and informing users in its own unique way.

In January 2000, Timothy Kay, Peter Levitan, and Robert Hoffer started the company ActiveBuddy, which would go on to create SmarterChild — a chatbot available for instant messaging programs that were popular at the time. SmarterChild first came to the internet through AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) in 2001. Eventually, it would also make its way to other services, including MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger. At the height of its popularity, the chatbot was handling over 1 billion inquiries a month across 17 million users.

What set SmarterChild apart from chatbots of today is that, rather than gleaning information from the web to provide an answer — such as ChatGPT, which comes with its own uncomfortable truths — SmarterChild's responses were "curated," meaning they were written by humans. This not only helped avoid misinformation and troublesome answers, it also prevented hallucinating — i.e., what happens when a chatbot generates false information in response to a prompt. SmarterChild also utilized pattern recognition, focusing on key phrases to better parse what a user was specifically asking for.

Fun and full of snark, the majority of users — 97%, in fact — were simply having friendly conversations with the bot. While it was capable of completing tasks, such as finding movie times or weather information, it could also use sarcasm — especially if you cursed around it. Unfortunately, ActiveBuddy had a difficult time making money with the chatbot, and it was eventually bought by Microsoft in 2006. While gone, its spirit lives in other chatbots, such as Apple's Siri, whose new and improved iteration will likely take over your iPhone soon.