Bots (and articles about bots – oops!) are popping up everywhere these days. Indeed, very few concepts have shot up the hype curve so fast, especially considering that the idea of conversational UI has been with us for a long time in various forms, and under different denominations. It looks like a jungle, but all bots are essentially doing the same thing: adding conversational capabilities to FAQ and search. You can read a good evolution and state of the art here and here. Personally, I had the pleasure of working for two companies that developed their own virtual assistant (basically a chatbot with a cute face).

I've just run my second briefing on intelligent assistance. Much happened in the few months between sessions. This time, the second half of the day was dominated with stories about bots and their use cases on messaging platforms. It also included the amazing things now possible via automated voice which Amazon's Alexa Challenge exemplifies. Meanwhile IBM's Watson continues its conquest of carbon life forms with the trashing of an extraordinarily talented Go grand master.

As financial services organisations predict and plan for the way consumers will manage their money in the future, artificial intelligence (AI) is high on the business development strategy for 2016 and beyond, says Gideon Hyde from design consultancy Market Gravity. The co-founder shares his thoughts on the emerging technology and explains how businesses can embrace AI to enhance their offerings, meet consumer demand for speed, personalisation and convenience, and launch new products and services to stand out in the competitive marketplace. AI is already around us and used every day within payments, money management and for robo-advice, particularly in the area of intelligent digital assistants that handle regular customer service enquiries and tasks. It can process'big data' far more efficiently than humans and can recognise speech, images, text, patterns of online behaviour, for example to detect fraud as well as appropriate advertisements for upselling. Smart machines and technology can turn data into customer insights and enhance service provisions, bringing the digital experience closer to the human interaction for consumers.

Amazon's voice activated digital assistant Alexa appears to know more about Prime Day than she's letting on. All she'll do at this point is recite a cryptic poem pointing A link has been sent to your friend's email address. Amazon's voice activated digital assistant Alexa appears to know more about Prime Day than she's letting on. All she'll do at this point is recite a cryptic poem pointing Elizabeth Weise

Recently, artificial intelligence ('AI'), has been booming, and with good reason. The reasons behind this can be explained fairly simply, as technology advances we see advancements in particular sectors, in this instance, AI. AI has been around for a long time, with earliest known uses in the 1950s. But the tech has evolved to a point where it can be used on the mainstream today. As a technology advances, it becomes much more accurate, which is the case here in AI as we see Apple launching AI in its Photos app and within Siri.

This has been the year of the chatbot. Siri opened up to developers recently. The Facebook Messenger bots arrived. The Slack App Store continues to evolve quickly with hundreds of bots. Chatbots have been in many ways disappointing to me, but they are an important step in the evolution of conversational technology.

S. Somasegar is a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group and the former head of Microsoft's Developer Division. Daniel Li is an investor with Madrona Venture Group. You can hardly talk to a technology executive or developer today without talking about artificial intelligence, machine learning or bots. Madrona recently hosted a conference on ML and AI, bringing together some of the biggest technology companies and innovative startups in the Intelligent Application ecosystem. One of the key themes for the event emerged from a survey of the attendees.

Recently, we have seen artificial intelligence triumph over humans in Jeopardy and chess. And there is a growing presence of virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, and Siri that populate our computers, phones, and homes. It's only a matter of time before A.I.-powered assistants play a significant role in the workplace, experts say. In fact, the global intelligent virtual assistant market is forecast to be worth 5.1 billion by 2022, up from - 600 million in 2014, according to Transparency Market Research. What are the potential benefits and challenges of giving smart virtual assistants a home in the enterprise?

Most retailers should be familiar with Alexa, Amazon's digital assistant that works through the company's Echo wireless speaker. Until recently Alexa could order product based upon a spoken command as long as it was something that you had previously ordered. While this was powerful Amazon has a larger goal in mind. This past week saw Amazon announce that Alexa now has more than 1,400 'skills', applications that Alexa is integrated to. For example, you can order an Uber simply by speaking to Alexa or organize a new playlist of songs from your music library.

At betaworks, we are very excited about the opportunities conversational interfaces offer for building new kinds of products, services, distribution channels and user experiences. We have been investing and building in this space for quite some time now. Given our curiosity and experience in this space, we introduced Botcamp back in April this year and we were blown away by the quality and quantity of applications in this space. We received over 400 applications from early stage bot companies from all over the world. These developers are building conversational services in various verticals from enterprise, finance, and commerce to travel, analytics and news on different platforms. Some products were thin bots, some had taken a human-assisted approach and some were a result of over a year's work on language analysis and machine learning in specific verticals.