Why chatbots are the talk of the town

'Chatbots are the new apps," said Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella earlier this year. He was not the first senior tech exec to make this claim. "Threads are the new apps," suggested Facebook's head of messaging products David Marcus in January, referring to the threads of conversation in apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Nadella and Marcus see chatbots – computer programs that you interact with by "chatting", for example in threads in messaging apps – as an important new human/machine interface. Both of their companies have launched tools to help developers create these bots, and between April and September, more than 30,000 were made for Facebook Messenger alone. The shopping and breaking news bots in Messenger's ancestors are chatbots such as AI psychotherapist Eliza from the mid-1960s and Parry, a bot mimicking a human with paranoid schizophrenia, in the early 1970s. Since 1991, the chatbot equivalent of the Olympics has been the annual Loebner prize, which challenges bots ...