Things to Come: The conversational computer - Transform

How do you register your child for primary school? Somewhere, in the millions of pages of your local government website, there are instructions, but how do you find them? She's a "chatbot," a conversational application written by Singapore's government to help citizens navigate its many sites. Jamie's smart, too: Even though our intrepid user (me) was browsing a government tech site, Jamie knew the question was better answered by the Ministry of Education. Jamie's an example of how new conversational interfaces, backed by huge cloud-based knowledge bases and inferencing, promise to change forever how we relate to computers.