The name Fred was initially suggested by Karen Lindsey, and then Robby jokingly came up with an acronym, "Functional Response Emulation Device.
"[1] Fred has also been implemented as a Java application by Paco Nathan called JFRED Archived 2008-08-24 at the Wayback Machine.
Fred Chatterbot is designed to explore Natural Language communications between people and computer programs.
This approach simplified the complexity of the rule base, but required expert coding and editing for modifications.
Fred was a predecessor to Albert One, which Garner used in 1998 and 1999 to win the Loebner Prize.