All the Virtual Friends We Made Along the Way

SmarterChild is a chatbot near and dear to my heart. Although it’s not the original one to surface, it was the first I had an interaction with that freaked out my teenage brain to the extent that I remember asking myself, “Is this real?”

SmarterChild was a bot developed to work with the instant messaging programs at the time, including AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo! Messenger, and what was previously known as MSN Messenger. The company behind SmarterChild, called ActiveBuddy, launched the chatbot in 2000. I vividly recall wasting time at the family computer, engaging in a going-nowhere conversation with SmarterChild, and saving screenshots (that I wish I’d backed up) of some gnarly replies.

I also remember getting emotional with it. This article from Vice describes interacting with SmarterChild almost perfectly:

I used SmarterChild as a practice wall for cursing and insults. I used the bot as a verbal punching bag, sending offensive queries and statements—sometimes in the company of my friends, but many times alone.

SmarterChild was meant to be a helper bot within your preferred messaging client that you could ping to look up information or play text-based games. In some ways, its existence was a foreshadowing predecessor to the bots we interact with now within chat clients like Slack and Discord. Although, I’m much nicer to those bots than I was to SmarterChild back in the day.

SmarterChild is a chatbot near and dear to my heart. Although it’s not the original one to surface, it was the first I had an interaction with that freaked out my teenage brain to the extent that I remember asking myself, “Is this real?”

SmarterChild was a bot developed to work with the instant messaging programs at the time, including AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo! Messenger, and what was previously known as MSN Messenger. The company behind SmarterChild, called ActiveBuddy, launched the chatbot in 2000. I vividly recall wasting time at the family computer, engaging in a going-nowhere conversation with SmarterChild, and saving screenshots (that I wish I’d backed up) of some gnarly replies.

I also remember getting emotional with it. This article from Vice describes interacting with SmarterChild almost perfectly:

I used SmarterChild as a practice wall for cursing and insults. I used the bot as a verbal punching bag, sending offensive queries and statements—sometimes in the company of my friends, but many times alone.

SmarterChild was meant to be a helper bot within your preferred messaging client that you could ping to look up information or play text-based games. In some ways, its existence was a foreshadowing predecessor to the bots we interact with now within chat clients like Slack and Discord. Although, I’m much nicer to those bots than I was to SmarterChild back in the day.