While the Messenger Bot revolution never took hold like Meta might have hoped, bots are still widely used, in a range of contexts, with many brands now implementing responder bots in messaging apps to streamline their customer connection process. And this could help further bot use. Today, Meta has released BlenderBot 3, an advanced bot responder dataset, which is able to engage with humans in a more natural way while also utilizing more prompts to guide users along a specific path of inquiry. "BlenderBot 3 is capable of searching the internet to chat about virtually any topic, and it's designed to learn how to improve its skills and safety through natural conversations and feedback from people "in the wild." Most previous publicly available datasets are typically collected through research studies with annotators that can't reflect the diversity of the real world."

Over the past few years, we have seen many examples of organizations applying conversational AI in meaningful ways. Accenture and Caesars Entertainment are making their employees more productive with enterprise bots. UPS and Asiana Airlines are using bots to deliver better customer service. And finally, BMW and LaLiga have built their own branded voice assistants, taking control of how customers experience their brand. These are just a few of the organizations that have built conversational AI solutions with Azure AI. This week at Microsoft Ignite, we announced updates to our products to make it easier for organizations to build robust conversational solutions, and to deploy them wherever their customers are.

In technical parlance, 2016 can be termed as a'chatbot year'. Chatbots have grown into a preferred platform for user interaction. At this point, we are not hearing about technology giving the push to simulate conversations with computers for the first time. The better-known sibling of chatbots, bot, has been around for some time allowing automation of tasks performed by a user. Chatbots have become the new obsession.

In technical parlance, 2016 can be termed as a'chatbot year'. Chatbots have grown into a preferred platform for user interaction. At this point, we are not hearing about technology giving the push to simulate conversations with computers for the first time. The better-known sibling of chatbots, bot, has been around for some time allowing automation of tasks performed by a user. Chatbots have become the new obsession.

As bot technology improves, businesses finding their way into more use cases where human judgment and effort have traditionally been required. Some relevant business use cases are assistant bots, finance compliance, supplementing HR practices etc. The use cases can be classified and explained in terms of automation and augmentation. Automation of routine tasks can improve overall productivity and performance. Augmentation bots powered by artificial intelligence and natural language processing are better than humans at switching task and sifting through gigabytes of data.