Chatbots and artificial intelligence: the state of play

The tech world's spotlight turned to chatbots after Facebook announced the launch of their own bot store on the Messenger platform at the F8 conference in April 2016. A few weeks later, the news has been covered extensively. It has also generated a lot of criticism. The two main arguments against are that this is nothing substantially new and that chatbots give only approximative answers. These hasty criticisms are due to the fact that most people haven't quite grasped the real concept behind the Messenger bot store.