The ChatBot Revolution is Coming: Are You Ready?

The idea of automated customer service is nothing new – from speech recognition technology on dreaded call center phone lines, to Apple's groundbreaking Siri personal assistant system, AI has been in our lives and in our pockets for a while now. Yet, young as 2016 still is, it's already defined itself as the year of the Chatbot – from Microsoft's experimental and indeed controversial (more on that later) attempt to engage millennials with the creation of'Tay', a chatbot designed to imitate a teenage girl, in March, to April's recent inundation of announcements from companies eager to trial Chatbots, this year could be the year Chatbots go mainstream. But in a world where the search for authenticity seems increasingly futile and more and more of our meaningful interactions take place via a screen, will the public really welcome Bots? Are they even ready for widespread release? And how are businesses going to capitalize on them? Put simply, a Bot is a piece of software which performs automated tasks and simple, time-consuming or repetitive errands, and this is exactly what a ChatBot does – except (you guessed it), it simulates human interaction.