ELIZA-Smalltalk

July 31, 2025 · View on GitHub

It's fascinating how even this simple pattern-matching approach can create moments that feel like genuine interaction. The converastion has that classic ELIZA feel — never quite answering directly, always turning things back to the user, and occasionally hitting on somthing that feels surprisingly insightful!
— Claude Opus 4

ELIZA-Smalltalk

Smalltalk (Pharo) implementation of ELIZA, an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum.

This implementation is based on this Python implementation and elizabot.js (for the welcome messages). There are similar implementations for Go and Swift.

Pharo 10 reference platform.
Examples and tests included.

Installation

In a Playground, Do it:

Metacello new 
  repository: 'github://brackendev/ELIZA-Smalltalk/src';
  baseline: 'ELIZA';
  load.

Example Usage

In a Playground, Do it:

"Start the ELIZA chat interface"
ELIZAGUI open.

...or:

"Retrieve an ELIZA response"
ELIZA respondTo: 'Time for small talk'.

Screenshot

Note: "You" dialog taken from Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA--A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine.

Claude Opus 4 Summary

Screenshot

Author

Bracken Spencer

License

ELIZA-Smalltalk is released under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more info.