SmarterChild launched on AOL Instant Messenger in 2001, built by the startup ActiveBuddy (founded in January 2000 by Timothy Kay, Robert Hoffer, and Peter Levitan). Users added it to their buddy list like a friend and could message it to look up news, weather, stock quotes, movie times, and sports scores, or to play text games. For a generation of teenagers in the early 2000s, it was the first chatbot they ever talked to.
According to the Computer History Museum’s account, at its height SmarterChild “had over 17 million users and handled 1 billion queries a month.” But the most telling finding was about why people used it. ActiveBuddy had built SmarterChild to deliver information; instead, the company discovered that “97% of users (many of them teenagers) were simply chatting with SmarterChild for fun,” a category it labeled “inane chat.” Part of its appeal was personality - it had a snarky tone and a profanity handler that fired back clever responses to insults.
That 97 percent number is the heart of the lesson. Two decades before ChatGPT, a simple rule-and-database bot revealed that the dominant use of a conversational agent was not retrieval but company - people wanted to talk to it, tease it, and see what it would say. SmarterChild sits in a direct line from ELIZA’s surprised users in 1966 to the companion-app boom of the 2020s, and several of its alumni went on to work on Siri.