NIALL - by Mat Peck

Niall (The Non-Intelligent Acquired Language Learner) is another chatterbot which in the beginning knows absolutely nothing. It was created by Mat Peck and released by his mini software house entitled 'Paranoid Software'. The inspiration for it came from a program for the 8-bit MSX home computers called DANI (Dynamic Artificial Non-Intelligence) and the author designed this program using a slightly different linking algorithm.

All you need to do is talk to Niall. At the prompt, just type in any old sentence, in any language and Niall will learn the words you type, remember how they fit together to form a sentence, and then make a reply. At first he will probably spend a lot of time simply repeating what you say until he begins to learn a few more words, at that point Niall will start generating original replies.

Niall for some reason looks like a DOS program running in a window. Why the author decided to place white text on a black background is beyond me, but in the help files he seems to blame Borland Pascal.

The 80k program is available on this site under the imaginative name of niall.zip