X ways to do Y, with bots! Waracle

There's been a lot of talk in the office about "bots", while definitely a buzz word at the moment is the hype justified? What are bots and what do they do? Bots are primarily services you can interact with, in a pseudo-human way, via a chat interface; be it text based, speech or visual communication. Essentially they let you do everyday tasks without having to deal with the tedium of human interaction. Although being thrust into the limelight by companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Slack the chatbot has a much longer history than you might expect.