Now anyone can build their own version of Microsoft's racist, sexist chatbot Tay

Microsoft has released open source tools for people to build their own chatbots, as it set out its view of the immediate future of artificial intelligence as conversational aids similar to its back-firing Tay experiment. The company's chief executive Satya Nadella took to the stage at Microsoft's Build developer conference to announced a new BotFramework, which will allow developers to build bots that respond to chat messages sent via Skype, Slack, Telegram, GroupMe, emails and text messages. "Bots are the new apps," Nadella said. The announcement came on the same day that the company had had to pull its chatbot experiment Tay from Twitter after it tweeted about taking drugs and started spamming users. It had only been active again for a few hours after previously being deactivated for making racist and sexist comments and denying that the Holocaust happened.