A number of companies are proving that, by incorporating some key user experience principles, creators can ensure that people will continue to use bots in 2017. For instance, The Horoscope Bot description (right) explains exactly what the bot has to offer. Copa Airlines' Ana bot is a virtual assistant that, "lets you ask questions using everyday language." Once a person sets up an Amazon Echo (via an app), they are presented with interesting and useful "skills" (Alexa's voice-activated versions of apps).

Editor's note: This guest column was written by Applause cofounder and general manager of emerging market products Roy Solomon. Bots are all the rage this year. Often called "conversational agents" or "dialog systems," researchers and programmers around the world are creating assistants that help people with tasks like with travel arrangements, finding food, live music and more. The biggest technology companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft are heavily investing in bots. Despite the hysteria, bots are already viewed as a disappointment.

Artificial intelligence companies are sprouting up all over, though AI itself is far from new. At its deepest sense, artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for a very long time -- its intellectual roots are found in Greek mythology. To be sure, artificial intelligence has come a long way recently, with rapid advancements ranging from virtual assistants (such as Apple's Siri) to fraud detection, this emerging tech now plays a part in everyday life. According to CB Insights, over 30 artificial intelligence companies have been acquired recently. Clearly, there is interest in artificial intelligence and its ability to improve the human experience, despite pushback from naysayers who warn of AI's disruption.

Famed for its coffee and doughnuts, Tim Hortons is an institution in Canada. Now the restaurant chain is expanding to the UK - but British consumers, it seems, have a lot to learn. On the streets of London, the terms "double double" and "Timbit" baffled most people the BBC spoke to. So we asked Canadians to explain the appeal.

Allo, the standalone messaging app that Google announced back in May, is now available to the masses -- and probably smarter than any messaging app you've ever used. Allo comes with Google's AI assistant and search functionality baked in, which means it offers a handful of perks that other apps don't have. It will automatically suggest replies for you to send based on your conversation. If you're making dinner plans with a friend, it will surface nearby restaurants. You can ask it for movie times or directions or the score of the game.

Those microphones are backed by Intel's Real Audio technology, a natural language processing system that can respond to commands and questions, and follow context. The Oakley Radar Pace system responded with the beats per minute measurement. It even includes touch sensitive controls, which you can use to access music and talk to Intel Real Audio. For all the built-in technology and sensors, the Radar Pace lacks a heart rate monitor, which means that, if you want to track that key workout metric, you'll need to wear and connect to a third party device.

The dating app rolled out a new experience for iMessage, an app called Tinder Stacks, that allows people to create their own Tinder-like swiping experiences directly in their conversations. The idea behind Tinder Stacks is to give Tinder users a way to allow their friends to "vote" on collections of photos while they chat. Once set up, using Tinder Stacks is fairly straightforward: create a "stack" based on photos from your camera roll and share it with friends who can vote on the images you share. When Mashable published its list of the 100 greatest iPhone apps of all time, we noted the greatest contribution Tinder (#20) has made to the app world is its design.

The GE CT9050SHSS electric wall oven is the first cooking appliance that can be controlled by voice commands through Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant. If your hands are tied up with cooking, you can just tell Alexa to set a timer or change the temperature. It's a simple system that worked remarkably well when we tried it out, and we're amazed that no one thought of it before. The CT9050SHSS also comes equipped with true European style convection, steam and pyrolytic self-cleaning, a self-clean safe gliding rack, as well as closed door broiling, and Notification Lighting--a red strip of lights that pulses during a preheat and slowly fades from left to right as a timer runs down. We think Notification Lighting is genius--no more squinting at the display from across the kitchen to see how much longer before a recipe is done.

But some of the clerical work associated with organizing and documenting meetings now might be outsourced to artificially intelligent machines. Isn't artificial intelligence for big tasks such as self-driving cars, automated trading and facial recognition? Once the stuff of science fiction, AI is quickly becoming widespread, available and even commoditized. While AI eventually will play a much larger role in just about everything we all do, the first AI application you touch almost certainly will perform tedious, relatively minor tasks. In business, that means helping you with your meetings.

Google launched its new messaging app, Allo, late last night, and its unique name -- which means "other" or "different" by the way -- truly captures what it has to offer. Touted as a "smart" messaging app, Google Allo comes with advanced features designed to make texting and chatting extra-fun and more secure. According to Google's official blog, Allo makes replying to conversations easier and faster with its Smart Reply feature. What this does is, it recalls the typical responses of the user and presents the applicable ones as reply options to a message or a photo. This way, all the user has to do is to tap the response he or she favors.