In the 1960s an MIT professor named Joseph Weizenbaum created a chatbot called ELIZA. The conversations people had with it set precedents for the chatbots to come.

Cohen, Lauren, Christopher Malloy, and Lukasz Pomorski. "Decoding Inside Information." Journal of Finance 67, no. 3 (June 2012): 1009–1043. (Winner of Chicago Quantitative Alliance Academic Paper ...