This 14-year-old made the best Facebook Messenger chatbot - BBC News

Yet despite the promise of a revolution in how we interact with services and companies online, progress has been utterly miserable - the vast majority of chatbots are gimmicky, pointless or just flat out broken. But this week I was given great cause for optimism, in the form of Alec Jones, a 14-year-old from Victoria, Canada. For the past six months, Alec been working on Christopher Bot, a chatbot that helps students keep track of homework they've been given over the course of a week. To set things up, a student shares his or her schedule with Christopher Bot, and from then on it will send a quick message at the end of each lesson asking if any homework had been set. "Do you have homework for maths?" it asked 30-year-old me pretending to be a child for the sake of this piece.