Announcing Eliza for PHP!

At a hackathon at the Madison PHP 2018 conference, on a lark I made a quick port of the classic ELIZA chatbot therapist to PHP. (It made sense in context, trust me.)

After a little further cleanup I'm happy to announce that it's now fully released on Packagist and just a quick composer require away!

For those not familiar with it, ELIZA was one of the very first natural language processing programs. By which I mean it runs a few regexes over text strings in order to pick a response that makes it sound vaguely like a real therapist, if you turn your head and squint and have never met an actual therapist. (With due apologies to the actual real therapists out there.)

It's even possible to run the Turing test with it! Although it's more a matter of you failing than it passing...

In any case, I was shocked to find that it had been ported to all sorts of languages but not to PHP that I could find. Now, that glaring oversight in PHP's ecosystem has been corrected and you can build your own chatbot therapist in no time.

(PRs may or may not be accepted, depending on how silly I'm feeling when I see them.)