It seems like everyone is making their service more human in 2016 by creating a bot, or at least a conversational interface, so you can just talk to computers the way you do with other people.

Chat apps have let us start interacting with apps, businesses and other services by just messaging them — now, for the first time you’re able to message companies like KLM to find out what went wrong with a flight, or make a change to your reservation.

What might surprise you is that they aren’t new at all. We’ve been using them — or at least trying — for decades, and that the very first conversational interfaces surfaced in the 1980’s and 1990’s — much of the time in games, and as an early method of text input.

Talking to computers

Why are we suddenly seeing an explosion in conversational interfaces? It seems like all of a sudden you’re able to get help and consume information just by messaging bots — but just a year or two ago that seemed ridiculous.

The truth is, over the last two years, it’s been a time of intense competition and innovation. For the last two decades at least, since computers went truly mainstream, the world has been obsessed with designing the perfect visual interface. How can we make our apps help users, and teach them how to get what they want to do done faster?

Graphical User Interfaces, often referred to as GUI for short, were the gold standard in a world where pointing and clicking was the primary interface. If you’re sitting at a desk with a mouse and keyboard, it makes sense to show you something visual to guide you about your way.

With the advent of the iPhone — and smartphones as a whole — that trend continued, but in recent times as design has become simpler, flatter and less complex, that changed.

People also realized that they actually didn’t need all that many apps. On average people are downloading fewer apps than ever — the average phone owner now downloads zero new apps each month. Even worse? People spend more than 85 percent of their time in the most popular apps.

People discovered, after almost ten years after the modern smartphone’s birth, that having a ton of apps cluttering up a phone isn’t useful and just added to cognitive load: where do I go to get the thing I want to do, done?

For developers, one of the hardest things is now getting people to download their app: it’s difficult and expensive, especially in a world where most of us just spend our time inside Facebook and Snapchat.

Enter conversational interfaces. All of a sudden, they’re everywhere — every messaging app has one, the major mobile players are releasing voice assistants inside speakers and more.

Conversational interfaces first blew up in Asia, now in the rest of the world — and they show no sign of stopping. Why is a simple conversation so compelling over visual design?

As it turns out, it’s often actually harder to do something visually. Ever needed to make a change to your flight reservation, only to click 12 times through eleven different screens and eventually give up, then call an actual human?

Yeah, we all have. Now imagine that, but you could just say what you wanted to do in the first place: “I want to change my flight.” A few seconds later you get a reply: “OK, when would you like to leave instead?”

Conversational interfaces are interesting not only because of the way they look or feel, synthesized speech or even voice recognition: it’s an intelligent interface where all you do is type, and the computer understands what you say, regardless of exactly how you word it.

They first came to us through software like Siri, which requires you to speak your request out loud, then you’ll get a response. In 2016, now there’s multiple ways to interact. If you use Google Allo, you can pull the company’s assistant into any chat thread by just mentioning it and do a search. If you have a Google Home, the very same assistant can be used by your voice anywhere in the home to track down packages, or find out how your calendar looks today. Facebook’s M can solve your every wish without ever leaving Messenger.

There are hundreds of these assistants, most of which didn’t even exist a year ago, already changing the game in mobile. Conversational interaction sounds like science fiction but this is the reality we live in right now — and it’s already improving the way we interact with computers in immeasurable ways.

How we got here

One of the earliest conversational interfaces — also known as a natural language processing computer program — was created in the 1960’s. It was called ELIZA, and simulated a conversation with a human by using a method called pattern matching, which gives the illusion of understanding, but in reality is a rather simple trick.

ELIZA was a basic conversational interface that ran on the command line, and a script called DOCTOR allowed the user to interact with the computer as if they were talking to a psychotherapist — who would then try to diagnose them.

ELIZA combined with DOCTOR was so effective at the time that it actually fooled some of its earliest test subjects into believing it was human. It might have been a trick, but these types of interfaces were invented, quite literally, fifty years ago.

Back then, a conversational interface was something of a science fiction pipe dream. In the 1983 movie War Games, David talks to the computer by just typing what he wants — but accidentally finds himself playing real global thermonuclear war instead of a game.