Your company's human resources department could get less human

Some of the questions you ask your human resources department could soon be answered by, well, non-humans. That's the concept behind Talla, a Boston-area start-up that has developed a chatbot to do some of the more mundane tasks that HR departments carry out on a daily basis. That includes explaining company policy, surveying employees, collecting information or training new hires. The Talla bot operates inside enterprise group messaging software, such as Slack, HipChat or Microsoft Teams, which has increasingly become an alternative to email as a method of digital communication within companies. Employees send messages to the chatbot just as they would a human, and it uses language processing software to understand the message and respond accordingly.