Conversational AI and the rise of the chatbots

You can hardly turn on the television news, pull a magazine off a rack in a doctor's office, or check out your social media without being confronted by a discussion about artificial intelligence. Whether the writer or talking head is decrying the imminent robot apocalypse or celebrating our deep-learning-based salvation, most of the coverage has one thing in common: an imprecise definition of AI. AI is, at its base, nothing more than software that simulates intelligence. One specific type of AI is cropping up all around the Internet: conversational AI, mostly in the form of chatbots. The most recent and high-profile news about AI was Google's announcement that its AI, called Google Assistant, beat the Turing test--150 times.