The recent announcement of Chatbot API from Facebook sets another milestone in one of the hottest trends in mobile as a growing number of leading social messaging platforms introduced bot development capabilities. In a nutshell, Messaging Bots allow people to connect and interact with businesses through chat. The bots assist the user to complete different actions, such as checking your bank account balance, purchasing items, and book a table at a restaurant. The idea of automatic chat is not new. Various types of websites offer the help of a virtual conversational agent.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is reportedly working on an Amazon Echo like device. The space for these kinds of devices is about to heat up as companies such as Google also announced intentions to enter it. A report from The Information revealed that the iPhone maker will open up Siri by releasing a Software Development Kit (SDK) at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2016. This will allow developers to develop and integrate apps with Siri, which should help in increasing the personal digital assistant's skills. While Siri is connected to some apps, the interactions involved are highly limited.

Siri, Cortana, and Google Now have all ceded some of the spotlight to new technologies (such as the Ambient User Experience we discussed yesterday), but at the end of the day, Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) such as the three listed above, will lead the way to Artificial Intelligence. AI may seem like a pipe dream but here's the shocker: we're already living in a world of AI. A Virtual Personal Assistant like Siri is an AI – just a very limited one. We tend to think of AI as C-3PO, or Sonny from I, Robot, but those are just advanced (fictionalized) versions of AI. This is an AI like Siri or Chess Wiz cum Cognitive Chef IBM's Watson.

Turns out a "useless" humanities degree can get you a job in Silicon Valley, thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence. The brains behind Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Microsoft's Cortana realized that to make their A.I.s sound more like people, they needed to hire workers whose creativity was less digital and more personal. According to the Washington Post, the teams behind many everyday A.I.s are made up of poets, writers, and comedians, who help give the robots more personality. Now, we're not saying that Silicon Valley's tech community is full of sociopaths or psychos, but software companies seem to have realized that hiring engineers from fields outside their own can help make their A.I.s more personable, and it's a much easier way to teach computers to think than turning them loose on the internet, which inevitably turns them into racists. Some companies are taking artificial assistants one step further.

I asked Siri whether she believes in God. "I believe in the separation of spirit and silicon," she demurred. I asked the chatbot ELIZA the same question -- her thing is she's a therapist, so she'd rather focus on what I believe. I asked her if she was religious; she asked if I'd prefer if she weren't. "We aren't really talking about me, are we," she replied.

I just got out of a meeting at SRI International, where representatives from both SRI and international banking group BBVA showed off something they've been working on for the past couple of years. Currently, SRI is best known as the research institute where Siri was developed before spinning out into a separate company and eventually being acquired by Apple, where it powers the Siri feature on the iPhone. SRI and BBVA have been collaborating on a new project, Lola, which they're pitching as a successor of sorts to Siri. Bill Mark, SRI's VP of Information and Computer Sciences, calls it "the next generation personal assistant". In this case, that personal assistant technology is being applied to a specific industry -- banking.

Seeking to catch up to rivals in the realm of voice-controlled services, Apple soon will allow software developers to connect their apps to its Siri digital assistant for the first time, according to a report on Tuesday. Apple also may offer a device similar to the Amazon Echo voice-controlled speaker, according to the report on The Information tech news web site. The report, citing anonymous sources, said Apple will soon release a software development kit allowing other companies to integrate their apps and services with Siri, while the company is still developing the "smart" speaker project. Amazon, by contrast, has partnered with numerous other companies so that owners of its Echo speaker can use the device to call an Uber car, order a Domino's pizza or play music from Spotify. Google last week announced it too would offer a voice-controlled speaker device, dubbed Google Home, that would also be open to third party services.

Apple is taking two big steps to improve its voice-controlled assistant, Siri, according to a new report from tech news site the Information that cites a single person with "direct knowledge" of Apple's plans. For one, it's apparently working on a standalone speaker that can house the voice-controlled assistant, like Amazon's Echo or the forthcoming Google Home. That may sound like some pretty big news, even Apple is a little late to the market for smart home hubs, apart from some small forays with Siri and the Apple TV. But the real revelation from the Infomation article is the report that Apple's going to open Siri up to developers, perhaps as soon as next month during the company's annual developers conference. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the report. "A change in Apple's developer relationship is more exciting than a new product?"

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. Application intelligence is the process of using machine learning technology to create apps that use historical and real-time data to make predictions and decisions to deliver rich, adaptive, personalized experiences for users. We believe that every successful new application built today will be an intelligent application. The armies of chat bots and virtual assistants, the e-commerce sites that show the right recommendations at the right time and the latest dating apps are all built to learn and create continuously improving experiences. In addition, legacy applications are becoming more and more intelligent to compete and keep pace with this new wave of applications. We have spent time thinking about the various ways intelligent apps emerge -- and how they are built.

Apple is preparing an SDK that would allow developers much greater access to Siri -- and the improved assistant will power a stationary hub device like Amazon's Echo. A report from The Information tallies with things we've heard over the last few weeks; expect an announcement, if not the device itself, at WWDC in June. Siri, sad to say, has not aged well. Features that were impressive four or five years ago have lost their luster, and rival services have leapfrogged the famous virtual assistant in countless ways. Siri's creators, of course, moved on years ago to work on something better: Viv, which they announced just weeks ago at Disrupt NY.