Here's how to bring on the bots – and make consumers forget they aren't human

Even though research and advisory firm Gartner says 30% of web browsing will be screenless by 2020, Purna Virji, senior Bing Ads PPC training manager, told marketers at the Inbounder on Monday (May 22) not to panic. Pointing to a Cortana video in which women plan a 30th birthday party in Las Vegas without any landing pages and instead rely on digital assistants to do the heavy lifting, Virji noted this is where consumers are headed, but she also reassured the Inbounder audience while there will be a shift away from screens, voice won't kill screens – just like mobile didn't kill desktop. According to Virji, we are training artificial intelligence (AI) to be human-like so that it looks at something, understands it, recognizes it and responds back – like Microsoft's how-old.net, or the #HowOldRobot, which is learning to understand faces and tell users how old they look, and Xiaoice in China, a social assistant on networks like Weibo and Touchpal – and who Virji said is designed to be users' friend. Like, say, if you tell Xiaoice you broke up with your boyfriend, she'll put you on a 30-day breakup plan, Virji said. As a result, Xiaoice has 40 million active monthly users – and 25% have told her they love her.