Verbot

The Verbot (Verbal-Robot) was a popularchatterbot program and Artificial Intelligence Software Development Kit (SDK) for the Windows platform and for the web.

Virtual Personalities, Inc. traces its technology back to Michael Mauldin's work as a graduate student and post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University; and its artistry back to Peter Plantec's work in personality psychology and art direction.

In 1994, Mauldin, Founder of Lycos, Inc., developed a prototype Chatterbot, Julia, which competed in the internationally known Turing test, for the coveted Loebner Prize. The Turing Test matches computer scientist judges against machines to see if they can distinguish a computer from a real human. This prototype version was refined and developed, and in 1997, Dr. Mauldin and Peter Plantec, a clinical psychologist, and animator, formed Virtual Personalities, Inc. (now Conversive, Inc.) in order to create a virtual human interface that would incorporate real-time animation as well as speech and natural language processing. The initial release, a stand-alone virtual person called Sylvie, was beta-tested to the public. This release was well received, and finally, after several versions, the production release (deemed version 3) of the Verbally Enhanced Software Robot—or, Verbot was deployed in the Fall 2000.

The Virtual Personalities story goes back to 1978, where Mauldin was attending Rice University. Fascinated by the idea of ELIZA, he proceeded to write a program called "PET" for his 8 kilobyte Commodore PET Computer. PET included simple induction as a way to post new information, and once managed the following deep observation: Meanwhile, Plantec was separately designing a personality for "Entity", a theoretical virtual human that would interact comfortably with humans without pretending to be one. At that time the technology was not advanced enough to bring Entity to life, however, Mauldin was working on that.

Mauldin got so involved with this, that he majored in Computer Science and minored in Linguistics.

In the late seventies and early eighties, a popular computer game at Universities was Rogue, an implementation of Dungeons and Dragons where the player would descend 26 levels in a randomly created dungeon, fighting monsters, gathering treasure, and searching for the elusive "Amulet of Yendor". Mauldin was one of four grad students who devoted a large amount of time to building a program called "Rog-O-Matic" that could and on several occasions did manage to retrieve the amulet and emerge victorious from the dungeon.

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