Bots are the new black, everyone wants to build one. If you want to do it too, unless you have a Natural Language Processing expert on your team, public APIs are your safest bet. For building an app that has to understand a single command (ex. Siri), current APIs may solve your problem. If you want to build a conversational agent, things get more complicated.

The engineers erupted in cheers as the pizzas arrived. They had ordered pizza, from start to finish, without placing a single phone call and without doing a Google search -- without any typing at all, actually. Moreover, they did it without downloading an app from Domino's or Grubhub. Of course, a pizza is just a pizza. But for Silicon Valley, a seemingly small change in consumer behaviour or design can mean a tectonic shift in the commercial order, with ripple effects across an entire economy.

Still in the depths of sleep, I reach out and grab it, knocking a cold cup of coffee over the unread mountain of books on my bedside. I swear loudly, mop up the mess with one hand and look blearily at the message on my screen. It's from Otis, 27, who I have apparently just matched with on Tinder: "Hey sexy like ur curls. Wanna come over n get naked and I'll show you my curls." There is no denying that the pursuit of love in the 21st century has become littered with digital landmines. There are now more than 91 million people around the world on dating apps – and most of that is thanks to Tinder.

A.I., or artificial intelligence, is one the rise in the technology field. Innovators are working to bring out the latest in the field, and startups are pushing to bring out the next big thing. The creators of the popular A.I program, Siri, may be well on their way to changing the game, as they've unveiled a new program that they say is "even better". Viv, created by Adam Cheyer and Dag Kittlaus (two of Siri's original creators), was demonstrated to the public at an industry event earlier this week. The program has been in development for several years and has received 12.5 million in funding, but the creators plan to take Viv farther than Siri – Viv will have the capacity to take on full tasks like getting an Uber to your location or a pizza from start to finish.

We've seen support for Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant arrive on a variety of devices, and iOS gadgets are next. The Next Web reports that the application mirrors Alexa's functionality on the Echo speaker and lets you place orders, control smart devices and do other general stuff like ask about the weather and movie listings. Unfortunately, it sounds like you'll still need an Echo if you want to take advantage of stuff like Amazon Prime Music or its book service.

Two of the minds behind Siri are set to unveil a new AI-powered digital assistant on Monday, May 9. Specifically, The Washington Post reports that Siri co-founders Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer will take the wraps off of Viv, an AI assistant said to be capable of handling much more complex tasks than its predecessor. Essentially, Viv will set itself apart from Siri by working with natural language to complete a complex series of tasks rather than taking one at a time. For example, you could ask Viv to make a restaurant reservation and buy movie tickets in one command, then Viv would carry out those tasks without sending you to an outside app. Viv could also react on the fly and make recommendations if, say, the movie is sold out. Comparatively, performing the same tasks with an AI assistant like Siri would require you to move between different apps with multiple commands. Of course, all of this requires some heavy integration with third-party services.

If you own a Tesla Model S or Model X you've been able to summon your all-electric car for nearly six months now, but one developer has created an even cooler way with Amazon's Echo. Using an unofficial Tesla API and the Echo, Jason Goecke created code that runs in the cloud to respond to keyword triggers with Alexa. "Ask KITT" (because everyone wants a Knight Rider car) is the command to pull the car out of the garage, and the video demonstration shows it working effortlessly. While Goecke's reverse engineering skills resulted in a "fun weekend project," he's really calling on Tesla to open up its developer tools to allow this type of function in a safe way. "Our friends at Tesla should work with the burgeoning developer community to open a fully supported and safe public API," says Goecke.

Two creators of Siri, Apple's virtual assistant for the iPhone and iPad, are reportedly preparing to unveil a new AI bot on Monday that they say will take the technology to the next level. Viv's capabilities will be demonstrated for the first time at a major industry conference on Monday, the Washington Post reported. It is among the most anticipated offerings in the artificial intelligence field in which Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon.com Intended to be essentially a better version of Siri, the developers want consumers to be able to get a pizza delivered, for example, without needing to phone, fill out a form online or use a restaurant app. All you would have to do is tell Viv what pizza you want and from where.

Next week, a new digital assistant launches – and it's supposed to be the most powerful yet. It's called Viv, and it's been in the making for four years, according to an article at the Washington Post. Viv is the brainchild of the same engineers that created Siri, the digital assistant first introduced on Apple's iPhone 4S in 2011. Since then, tech companies have been scrambling to introduce the next big thing in artificial intelligence, from Microsoft's Cortana to Google Now. Yet, it seems that none have cracked the code to a true AI-centric future.

At this spring's Hack Upstate event my team build an Amazon Alexa skill. I came up with the idea of creating a murder mystery game that involved interaction with Alexa because I saw it as an opportunity to force a collision between the world I am immersed in (writing and content creation) and the world I am moving towards (programming and data analysis). I've been considering how these two spheres of knowledge interact for quite some time. My education in writing was earned through years of participation in groups, through classes and through degrees, whereas my education in programming has been primarily self-taught, ad hoc and in general, isolated, with only brief forays into makeshift classrooms. I've learned that these are two very different styles of thinking, very different processes and at times, contrast rather sharply.