Fred by Robby Garner at Robitron Software Research

The FRED's are an on-going experiment to explore Natural Language communications between people and computer programs. In particular, this is a study of conversation between people and ways that a computer program can learn from other people's conversations to make it's own conversations.

There is an element of context within a conversation. The computer has no experiences of its own to begin with. But it does have a library of basic phrases/responses that it can use to interact with humans and, if the humans are willing to teach, new phrases and responses can be learned.

FRED13 can also be trained to carry out commands. He can be instructed to display texts, run programs, or interact with strangers on a BBS. FRED13 can even do the argument routine from Monty Python. A sample conversation is below: