Bots: What you need to know

The call for proposals for the O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference, September 17-20, 2017, in San Francisco, is now open. "Bots are the new apps"--Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft Bots are a new, AI-driven way to interact with users in a variety of environments. As AI improves and users turn away from single-purpose apps and toward messaging interfaces, they could revolutionize customer service, productivity, and communication. Getting started with bots is as simple as using any of a handful of new bot platforms that aim to make bot creation easy; sophisticated bots require an understanding of natural language processing (NLP) and other areas of artificial intelligence. Since late 2015, bots have been the subject of immense excitement in the belief that they might replace mobile apps for many tasks and provide a flexible and natural interface for sophisticated AI technology.