How Chatbots Go Where Apps Cannot

If you are interested in reaching customers that you can't get to now, in offering user experiences that go beyond the rigid orchestration of the point and click paradigm, in providing just the right data that someone needs, it may be time to consider creating a chatbot. When I ran across the description of Colin Megill's course for O'Reilly Media about how to build your own chatbot (which is starting on July 13), I thought of Eliza, one of the pioneering chatbots that did a serviceable job of parsing sentences and tossing them back to you. Eliza made it seem like you were having a conversation if you got lucky. If you said something it couldn't handle, the conversation quickly got dull or non-sensical. The world has grown up.