Microsoft hopes Cortana will lead an army of chatbots to victory

If Bloomberg Businessweek's latest cover story didn't make obvious enough, the hour or so the company dedicated to them on stage at its BUILD developer conference should have cleared up any doubts: Microsoft sees Cortana as a big part of its future. It wants the AI assistant to do everything, but knows it can't make that dream a reality by itself. Its new framework allows developers to build an independent chatbot that plays nice with users and Cortana. It's not the only one pursuing the goal of the perfect assistant, though, and there's no telling if its efforts to inspire an army of chatbots will be successful. Although chatbots have been around for half a century, they didn't have a practical use until the internet took hold.