To chat or not to chat? Shakespeare has the answer to your question

Chatbots are vying to become one of the cornerstones of the messaging world: using AI tools like natural language and machine learning, developers are hoping to tap into the popularity of chat apps as a medium of communication to explore new ways to help you get information, buy things, plan your life and more by letting you converse with intelligent computers instead of humans. In the latest release, presented today at the Hackathon at TC Disrupt in San Francisco, a chatbot is hoping to drop some literary knowledge on the world and create a fun way of getting answers to your most pressing questions about life. Shakespeare, as the bot is called, is a new messaging bot based on the works of the Bard of Avon. The developers have taken his poems and plays -- which are available open-source -- pulled out all of the most famous lines, and compiled them into a database. They then applied a natural language parser to index and understand the lines.