> The state of the art before modern neural networks was [Eliza] To be fair, I think Alice and other pattern-based chatbots where already much better then that

> The state of the art before modern neural networks was [Eliza] To be fair, I think Alice and other pattern-based chatbots where already much better then that. I have seen them confused for people in IRC chats more than 10 years ago. Still, it seems to me the older issue of "lack of context" is still there even if the current results are very impressive. I would be curious to see what happens if asking to change the tone ("could you answer more briefly/tersely/verbosely/whatever?").