If Bloomberg Businessweek's latest cover story didn't make obvious enough, the hour or so the company dedicated to them on stage at its BUILD developer conference should have cleared up any doubts: Microsoft sees Cortana as a big part of its future. It wants the AI assistant to do everything, but knows it can't make that dream a reality by itself. Its new framework allows developers to build an independent chatbot that plays nice with users and Cortana. It's not the only one pursuing the goal of the perfect assistant, though, and there's no telling if its efforts to inspire an army of chatbots will be successful. Although chatbots have been around for half a century, they didn't have a practical use until the internet took hold.

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Unfortunately, Microsoft Corp.'s most high-profile attempt at showcasing the future – the conversational chatbot called Tay – turned into a racist, anti-social monster that appears unfixable. But even if Tay worked perfectly, it didn't actually have any jobs to do, and the kind of bots Microsoft wants its software partners to develop and host on platforms like Skype are intended to reshape technology from something based on pointing and clicking to an actual conversation with our machines. Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella outlined his vision of the future to a crowd of software developers in a keynote speech on Wednesday at the company's Build conference in San Francisco. The event was chockablock with updates to Microsoft services: The first major update to Windows 10 was confirmed for the summer, Xbox will be better integrated with Windows, the same goes for Linux, and the HoloLens augmented reality visor will begin to ship to developers immediately. But the main thrust of the event was for Mr. Nadella to describe how bots and machine learning tools are going to create a new "distributed computing fabric" that will vault Microsoft back into relevance on mobile platforms that are built and owned by rivals at Apple and Google.

Microsoft also announced a series of APIs (22 of them) as part of its Cognitive Services. These APIs are built around more general intelligence services (vision, speech, search, contextual knowledge and so on) that developers can build into their applications. Microsoft demonstrated some incredible early applications of this, such as the ability to take a picture and have it recognize the objects in it, but also to build information about the image using what it called CaptionBot. In one demonstration, Microsoft showed off what it called CRIS, or custom recognition intelligence service, and compared a speech-to-text translation of a child speaking. Naturally, its analysis showed a much higher precision of interpretation based on its knowledge of child speech patterns.

At Microsoft's Build conference on Wednesday, CEO Satya Nadella laid out his company's vision for the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Microsoft has already made plain its ambitions to make Cortana and its machine learning-based engine more useful and pervasive. Nadella elaborated on those ambitions during Wednesday's Build keynote, describing Microsoft's concept of "conversational computing" and how it will be integrated in everything from Windows, its Edge browser, Outlook and Skype, to the entire ecosystem of software, hardware and cloud-based SaaS offerings. Nadella sees conversational computing using speech as the next user interface and framework for how all applications are developed and connected. In a callback to the name of the conference, Nadella called on developers to "build" the next wave of applications based on tools and services that Microsoft is rolling out, including 22 Cognitive Services APIs for the Azure-based Cortana Intelligence Suite (previously called the Cortana Analytics Suite) and the new Microsoft Bot Framework.

Microsoft spoke at length at Build 2016 about its vision for the future of communicative computing. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella expressed his belief that the next leap in consumer interactions with platforms will move beyond the traditional confinements of everyday operating system navigation to a more predictive artificial intelligence presence in people's lives. However, before Nadella's utopian science fiction fantasy becomes an everyday reality for the average consumer, Microsoft along with the rest of the industry will need to refine the API's, natural language frameworks, and machine learning of the bots that will be communicating with people. Shortly after Build 2016, Microsoft Cognitive Services page surfaced on the internet to help developers enable natural and contextual interactions between their services and the customers they link to. Microsoft Cognitive Services let you build apps with robust algorithms using just a few lines of code.

If you'd inadvertently unleashed a Neo-Nazi sex-bot on an unsuspecting Internet, you might be reluctant to proclaim the technology as the future of computing. Microsoft, it seems, has no such qualms. Just a few days after yanking the errant chatbot Tay from the Internet, Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, announced that he expects similar (though presumably less offensive) bots to become a commonplace. In fact, Microsoft seems to believe that "conversational computing" could be a major new paradigm in computing. "We want to take the power of human language and apply it more pervasively to all of the computing interface and the computing interactions," Nadella said during his keynote at the company's Build 2016 conference for developers.

Microsoft Translator is a cloud-based automatic text and speech translation (a.k.a.

The way you add a bot is the same way you'd add a contact; indeed, the Add Contact screen in Skype now has two categories: "People" and "Bots." As of right now, the only Bots available to add on Skype are Bing Music, Bing News, Bing Images, Getty Images and Build Bot (which is mostly centered around the Build conference). They're mostly in Preview mode at the moment (in other words, they're still sort of in beta), but they do appear to be functional. As you might expect, the chat bots respond to very specific keywords. For example, with the Bing Music bot, typing in "Hello" would bring up Adele's song (a link to her YouTube video, it looks like) rather than polite small talk.

We live in an era of accelerating change, when scientific and technological advancements are arriving rapidly. As a result, we are developing a new language to describe our civilisation as it evolves. Here are 20 terms and concepts that you'll need to navigate our future. Back in 2007 I put together a list of terms every self-respecting futurist should be familiar with. I reached out to several futurists, asking them which terms or phrases have emerged or gained relevance since that time.