In this article, the most essential aspects related to the development and study of chatbots are examined. In the given context, the essential types, particularities of chatbots and methods of creating chatbots at the current stage are studied from the perspective of the development of Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). The most important achievements in the respective field obtained over time as well as the trends in the development of modern chatbots are examined.

The article addresses the issue of training and developing programming competence in students and high school students for performance education and describes some online tools that facilitate this process.

The article analyzes the main pre-acquisitions of high school graduates in the field of programming and presents the statistics of the results of the initial testing of future computer scientists.