Bots In The Wild -- Startup Traction (by NextView)

Besides Pokémon reclaiming its place in the zeitgeist, bots are the buzzing tech trend of 2016 so far. The big five -- Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft -- have all unveiled or featured bots in their annual product conferences. Consumer startup decks have hurriedly affixed bots to their pitches, for better or for worse. The New Yorker covered conversational bots in June. Bot has quickly become as common as the word app has been in startup chatter about what people are building: its a bot for'X' (in this case X usually stands for a mundane, predictable task currently carried out by humans).