Nicole (The Nearly Intelligent Computer Operated Language Examiner) is an attempt to simulate a conversation by learning how words are related to other words. A Human communicates with her via the keyboard and she responds back with its own sentences which are automatically generated, based on what is stored in her database.

Nicole evolved from the theory that if a computer is given enough combinations of how words, phrases and sentences are related to one another, it could talk back to you. She was developed by by Phil Howlett using C++ for the Linux operating system, and there is a web-based version located on the Nicole website.

The original Nicole was written back in 1992, in Turbo Pascal 7, and ran on an IBM 386. The hardware limitations of the time meant that after a knowledge base of 200 words, and a vocabulary of about 50 sentences, it took almost twenty minutes to reply between each sentence. With today's fast hardware the author believes that the project now is much more viable.

Nicole is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nicole