The purpose of this paper is to serve as a reference guide for the development of chatterbots implemented with the AIML language. In order to achieve this, the main concepts in Pattern Recognition area are described because the AIML uses such theoretical framework in their syntactic and semantic structures. After that, AIML language is described and each AIML command/tag is followed by an application example. Also, the usage of AIML embedded tags for the handling of sequence dialogue limitations between humans and machines is shown. Finally, computer systems that assist in the design of chatterbots with the AIML language are classified and described.