Is it Live? Or is it Chatbot::Eliza?

"Eventually, she changed her message to something more conventional, probably under threat of severe beatings from her friends and family. But before she changed it, she got to where she wouldn't even bother answering the phone if she was available; it was a lot of fun listening to people talk to a machine, thinking they were talking to a person.

"I can relate. Ever since High School, I've wanted to write programs that acted like, or looked like real people. I remember playing with a program called Eliza when I was young and thinking how amazing it was that it worked as well as it id. The Eliza program would impersonate a Psychiatrist and attempt to "analyze" your "problem" by holding a natural language conversation with you. However, as soon as you realized that it was just matching simple patterns, it would mention something that you had said earlier, just to throw you for a loop. It was primitive, but effective."

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