Nearly: We worked with one particular coder from Virtus, who was a (very good) NL person, who worked with us to implement the original engine that we and she designed (I've still got my original design docs - at least the ones that weren't written on Groucho Club table cloths…). What made Spookitalk (itself about the fourth title it had) so effective was that we combined the outlook of engineers (who always try to disambiguate) and writers (who play with the ambiguity and 'noise' of natural language) to create an engine that was explicitly focussed on delivering the illusion of intelligence by whatever means - a large proportion of the later work was focussed on just that - handling and interpreting the contextual and colloquial 'noise' around a conversation and using it to deliver appropriately smartarse responses. In that regard, Spookitalk was the spiritual successor to ELIZA.