A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), also referred to as Alicebot, or simply Alice, is a natural language processing chatterbot—a program that engages in a conversation with a human by applying some heuristical pattern matching rules to the human's input. It was inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum's classical ELIZA program.
It is one of the strongest programs of its type and has won the Loebner Prize, awarded to accomplished humanoid, talking robots, three times (in 2000,[1] 2001,[1] and 2004). The program is unable to pass the Turing test, as even the casual user will often expose its mechanistic aspects in short conversations.
Alice was originally composed by Richard Wallace;[2] it "came to life" on November 23, 1995.[3] The program was rewritten in Java beginning in 1998. The current incarnation of the Java implementation is Program D. The program uses an XML Schema called AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) for specifying the heuristic conversation rules.[4]
Alice code has been reported to be available as open source.[5] The AIML source is available from ALICE A.I. Foundation on Google Code and from the GitHub account of Richard Wallace. These AIML files can be run using an AIML interpreter like Program O or Program AB.