A note to our listeners, this episode contains mention of suicide.

Joseph Weisenbaum of MIT named his creation Eliza, after Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady.

Human name, Eliza, even though Eliza wasn't a human at all.

It was a natural language processing computer program.

You could type things to Eliza, and it, she, it, would give language back to you through pattern matching and substitution.

Eliza was one of the first chatter bots.

We call them chatbots today.

One of the most popular simulated conversations that Eliza ran was called

Doctor, meant to sound like a psychotherapist, where the computer would take your questions

and kind of turn them around on you. Now, people loved Eliza. Joseph Weisenbaum was pretty

shocked, actually, by how much folks, including his own secretary,

would insist that Eliza had real feelings and could really understand them.

And Weisenbaum had to keep insisting that, no, it can't.

It's just feeding information back to you.

But people really loved Eliza. They bonded with Eliza. They say that it helped them.

Eliza debuted in 1966, 59 years ago. Now, a lot has happened, obviously, with computer technology

since then. Computers and software are much more sophisticated, and so are bots.

How sophisticated?

Well, a program called Therobot was able to reduce symptoms of major depressive disorder by 51% in a clinical trial.

It's still, like Eliza, definitely not a person. But dang, 51%. It's

Depreshmode. I'm John Moe. I'm glad you're here.

Dr. Nicholas Jacobson is an associate professor of biomedical data science, psychiatry, and computer science at Dartmouth.

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