When I am feeling blue and want companionship I ask Siri "what are you doing later?" She responds either (depending on her mood I suppose) "I'm working on some pickup lines," or "People have been asking me how it feels to be me. I'm plumbing the depths of my inner reality to come up with a response." I know Siri is all mine because when I ask her if she has a boyfriend she tells me "I think I'd be hard to date. I've been told I'm a workaholic."

SAN FRANCISCO – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the company's Build developers conference with a vision of the future filled with chatbots, machine learning and artificial intelligence. "Bots are the new apps," said Nadella during a nearly three-hour keynote here that sketched a vision for the way humans will interact with machines. That's the world you're going to get to see in the years to come." Onstage demos hammered home those ideas. One involved a smartphone conversing with digital assistant Cortana about planning a trip to Ireland, which soon found Cortana bringing in a Westin Hotels chatbot that booked a room based on the contents of the chat.

Right after its millennial Tay bot turned genocidal might not seem like the best time for Microsoft to pin its future on bots, conversations and artificial intelligence, but that's exactly what Satya Nadella announced at Build 2016 last night. The Redmond CEO claimed that "we are on the cusp of a new frontier that pairs the power of natural human language with advanced machine intelligence". Microsoft wants to bring conversation into so many places that it becomes the next stage of the GUI; "we want to take the power of human language and apply it more pervasively to all computing interfaces," Nadella said. Conversations as a Platform, as Microsoft calls it, envisions a world where you ask Cortana to block out the week you'll be at a conference in your calendar and she tags in the bot from your favourite hotel to book a room for the right dates. This bot, by the way, already knows what kind of room you prefer, and suggests a message to send to a friend who lives nearby letting them know when you'll be in town.

Microsoft has revealed a future where we will interact with numerous'bots' to do everything from book hotels and manage our diaries, to order pizza. Shown off at the company's annual Build conference in San Francisco, bots will take artificial intelligence - and how humans interact with computers - into a new generation. Explained as simply as possible, bots are like personal assistants with apps who can be given orders. By understanding natural human language, the bots know - and will learn over time - what we want from them, and can be tuned to become smarter and more efficient. An example Microsoft gave was how a bot could be used by Dominos to help automate pizza orders.

Microsoft has announced a new way for developers to create bots that can do a variety of tasks, from playing Tic Tac Toe to having full conversations with you. The Rich Bot framework will have cognitive services and will learn through machine learning. An open source Bot Builder SDK will make it easy to build bots that work over SMS, Office, Skype, Twitter, Slack and a variety of other services as well. The new runtime works off of Microsoft's own Azure platform, and it supports both Node.JS and C#. There will be a Bot Directory to showcase a sample of the open source bots.

Truth is, nobody can stop you from showing your friends all the messages you get on dating sites, especially the creepy PMs women get all the time due to the gender disparity in many services. Maybe you want to ask them what they think of your prospective date based on your conversation or to warn them off talking to this person who's been harassing you on the app for months. But making eavesdropping an actual feature in a dating app is alarming. A lot of people would consider inviting friends to watch a private convo from behind a cloak of invisibility a betrayal of trust and a huge violation of privacy. The app's creator, Alejandro Ponce, told TechCrunch that he believes men would still join his service despite the feature's existence, though, because "boys will be wherever girls are."

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella holds court at the company's Build conference. Like other techies, he's interested in the potential of artificial intelligence. Microsoft has seen the future, and it's filled with bots. No, not robots or flying drones, but rather these new apps that can perform simple tasks at your beck and call. Want to book a flight? Microsoft believes a bot can do that for you.

Microsoft wants people to have more intelligent conversations with their computers. The giant software company is promoting new tools for software developers to build intelligent "bots" or commercial programs that will work with Cortana, its voice-activated digital assistant, to perform tasks like booking a hotel room, ordering a meal or arranging a delivery. Microsoft recently shut down an experimental messaging bot after some Twitter users taught it to make offensive statements. CEO Satya Nadella said the episode showed the importance of designing technology to be "inclusive and respectful." Nadella touted the power of "conversational" computing at the company's annual Build conference for software developers in San Francisco, where Microsoft also announced some updates to its flagship Windows 10 software.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, a respected leader of one of the world's largest and most important technology companies, speaks as if humanity lives on the cusp of science-fiction. At today's Microsoft Build press conference, Nadella said of the not-so-distant-future, "It's not going to be about man versus machine, it's going to be about man with machines." The line addresses a sincere concern held by esteemed scientists like Stephen Hawking that artificial intelligence could one day eliminate human life. Nadella points to Microsoft's own artificially intelligent assistant Cortana as a positive example of our early coexistence with AI. The tool follows its users across Microsoft platforms, solving problems over the course of a day.

"We, as a company, are optimistic about what technology can do for us." Those were among the first words said by Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, as he took the stage at the company's Build 2016 keynote. If that statement seems overly broad, it's not the fault of Nadella's speechwriter. The company's keynote was a reminder that Microsoft has its hands on many tech projects, and sees bright days ahead. But much of that future may not involve things you might find on an average store shelf.