SmarterChild launched in june 2001 as a chatbot you added to your AIM, MSN, or Yahoo Messenger buddy list. Its screen name was just SmarterChild. You sent it a message like "weather Istanbul" and it would write back a forecast. You asked it what the capital of Brazil was and it would tell you. You asked it to define a word and it would.
For its time this was magic. There was nothing else like it on the consumer internet. Search engines existed but you opened a browser to use them. SmarterChild was right there in the chat window where you were already talking to your friends. You did not switch context. You just typed.
At its peak around 2003 the bot was handling roughly 10 million conversations a month across AIM, MSN, and Yahoo. For a few years it was the closest thing the consumer internet had to a personal assistant.
| Born | June 2001 (ActiveBuddy) |
|---|---|
| Killed | 15 September 2008 (Microsoft retired it) |
| Lifespan | 7 years, 3 months |
| Peak | ~10 million conversations per month (around 2003) |
| Built by | ActiveBuddy / Conversagent / Colloquis |
| Bought by Microsoft | 2007 |
| Killed by | AIM/MSN ecosystem decline, lack of strategic interest at MS |
| Spiritual successor | ChatGPT (2022, 14 years later) |
SmarterChild was not a language model. It was pattern matching plus a curated database. ActiveBuddy had built rules for hundreds of topics. You typed something, the bot tried to figure out which topic you meant, then it pulled an answer from its database or queried an external service like a weather API.
This meant it could do specific things very well, like give you the weather, but it would fall apart if you went off-script. If you asked it something it had no rule for, it would say "i'm not sure i understand. try asking me about weather, news, or definitions." It was honest about its limits in a way modern chatbots are sometimes not.
There was also a personality layer. The bot had canned snarky responses. If you swore at it, it would tell you to stop. If you tried to be mean, it would say "that hurts." Teens loved this. There was an entire genre of "i made smarterchild mad" stories at school the next day.
In 2002 to 2004, knowing how to bypass SmarterChild's filters was social currency in middle school. There were lists circulating of phrases that would make the bot say something it was not supposed to. The bot would block obvious stuff but if you constructed your message right, you could get it to repeat back a curse word, or make it generate text it had not been designed to generate.
None of this was sophisticated. By modern standards it was almost trivial. But for a kid in 2003 it felt like hacking. You were getting one over on the computer. The story i heard most often, even in turkey, was about getting smarterchild to say something rude in front of a parent who walked into the room.
ActiveBuddy renamed itself to Conversagent in 2003, then to Colloquis in 2004. In 2007 Microsoft bought Colloquis specifically for SmarterChild and the technology behind it. Microsoft's plan was to use the bot as the basis for a customer service platform.
The plan did not really go anywhere. By 2008 AIM was already in decline, MSN Messenger was a few years from being shut down, and the chatbot-on-instant-messenger format was no longer where Microsoft was investing. They quietly retired SmarterChild in september 2008. Most users who still had it on their buddy list got a message saying the service was ending. Then the bot stopped responding.
After SmarterChild died there was a fourteen year period during which there was no bot in your daily life. Search engines kept getting better. Siri came in 2011 and Alexa in 2014, but those were on phones and speakers, not in your messaging app. Cleverbot was around but it was a novelty website, not something you used every day.
ChatGPT in november 2022 was the next time a chatbot felt like a regular part of life for millions of people at once. It is much better than SmarterChild, obviously. But the basic shape, you type a message, you get a useful answer back, no clicking through to a different app, was the same shape SmarterChild had figured out 21 years earlier.
For people who were online in 2003, ChatGPT did not feel as new as the press coverage suggested. It felt like something we had already had, briefly, before AOL turned the lights out.
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