Social Bots: The Emerging Social AI Market – IQT – Medium

Mobile messaging platforms and social networking services combined with recent advancements in natural language understanding and processing (NLU/P) have helped create an emerging market for social bots. Today, social bots can do everything from manage your calendar to order you an Uber or provide fashion advice in the course of a conversation. As social bots become intertwined, and integral, within social network services and everyday digital interactions it's quite likely that conversational social bots will be the first exposure many people have with anything approximating artificial intelligence (AI). Looking back, the origin of social bots is inexorably rooted in the development and adoption of social networking services and messaging platforms spanning several decades. Social bots found on platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and Kik today share distinctive pedigree with party-line Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), CompuServe, and AOL.