Understanding the Facebook and Microsoft Chatbot Revolution

Microsoft and Facebook both recently announced that they will be heavily investing in bots. Each company has created an accompanying framework for developing chatbots, which you can use to deploy your own bots on their respective services--Skype and Messenger. Microsoft's Satya Nadella is so bullish on bots that he spun up a Domino's chatbot in real time when he made the company's announcement, which is super cool and exactly why I am long MSFT! These new frameworks make that case even more strongly than we ever could. But in the rush to bring forth this new reality, what a bot is and what it can do is not so obvious.