Apple's unexpected approach to bots

At betaworks, we are very excited about the opportunities conversational interfaces offer for building new kinds of products, services, distribution channels and user experiences. We have been investing and building in this space for quite some time now. Given our curiosity and experience in this space, we introduced Botcamp back in April this year and we were blown away by the quality and quantity of applications in this space. We received over 400 applications from early stage bot companies from all over the world. These developers are building conversational services in various verticals from enterprise, finance, and commerce to travel, analytics and news on different platforms. Some products were thin bots, some had taken a human-assisted approach and some were a result of over a year's work on language analysis and machine learning in specific verticals.