Microsoft CEO Nadella: 'Bots are the new apps'

SAN FRANCISCO – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the company's Build developers conference with a vision of the future filled with chatbots, machine learning and artificial intelligence. "Bots are the new apps," said Nadella during a nearly three-hour keynote here that sketched a vision for the way humans will interact with machines. That's the world you're going to get to see in the years to come." Onstage demos hammered home those ideas. One involved a smartphone conversing with digital assistant Cortana about planning a trip to Ireland, which soon found Cortana bringing in a Westin Hotels chatbot that booked a room based on the contents of the chat.