The XML dialect called AIML was developed by Richard Wallace and a worldwide free software community between 1995[citation needed] and 2002.

Free AIML sets[5] in several languages have been developed and made available by the user community.

A pattern like will match an infinite number of inputs, including "what is your name", "what is your shoe size", "what is your purpose in life", etc.

To compensate for the simple pattern matching capabilities, AIML interpreters can provide preprocessing functions to expand abbreviations, remove misspellings, etc.

Templates may also redirect to other patterns, using an element called srai (Symbolic Reduction in Artificial Intelligence).

This can be used to implement synonymy, as in this example (where CDATA is used to avoid the need for XML escaping): The first category simply answers an input "what is your name" with a statement of the bot's name.