Microsoft taught a computer to make 'chit chat' -- and now 40 million people love it

Everybody from Facebook to Microsoft to President Barack Obama thinks that chat bots -- robots you talk to like humans in apps like Facebook Messenger or Microsoft's Skype -- are the future. As showcased by the relative success of gadgets like the Amazon Echo and digital agents like Apple's Siri or Microsoft's Cortana, we're at the precipice of a new kind of computing, where you can use your natural language skills to get stuff done. The problem is chat bots these days kind of stink out. It's often harder to get stuff done with a chat bot than it is with the suite of apps and websites to which we've become accustomed. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Tay Twitter bot had a high-profile meltdown, showing how far AI still has to go.