In the early 1990s, Sound Blaster Pro sound cards came with a "psychiatrist" chat bot called Dr. SBAITSO which would reply in text and actually speak it out loud (showcasing the TTS). As a kid, I thought it was amazing, and I spent countless hours trying to converse with it. From a superficial level, modern chat bots seem roughly as good as the old doc.
I came to post the same. SBAITSO was obviously pretty simple but it had enough tricks to convince you, superficially, that there was some intelligence there, and you could spend hours talking to it.
