This year, we've watched Apple, Google, Facebook, Samsung, Microsoft, and many other tech giants make acquisitions or launch products to get into the bot business. They're building bot ecosystems around their chat app platforms -- in SMS, web pages, and elsewhere -- but they're still facing one of the biggest problems in this age of artificial intelligence: How do you find the very best bots? Microsoft wants to expand its bot directory, Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE Labs at Microsoft Research, told VentureBeat in an interview Wednesday, and the company wants to do it with the help of developers and other chat app platforms. "My hope is that we can do something more like search does with web pages, rather than a very closed directory that just Microsoft owns, and we kind of lean that way anyway because we support all these channels," Cheng said. No prospective launch date has been set for an expanded Microsoft bot directory, but Cheng said Microsoft wants to work with the bot developer community and other platforms to create a directory that includes names like Skype, Facebook Messenger, Kik, and Slack -- some of the biggest chat app platforms in the world.

The tech paradigm has been changing, or at least, we are made to believe so. We are slowly yet steadily moving towards bots, and that doesn't necessarily mean away from apps, not yet at least. Leading tech companies who usually decide tech trends have made it clear at their respective annual tech events that bots are coming! Chatbots can be described as automated programs to help communicate with businesses, and also make purchases online. With tech businesses' increasing interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning, bots are believed to take the centre stage when it comes to users communicating with said businesses.

Bot Directory is created with a goal to be comprehensive source of information about bots (short for of'robots') – computer programs that can run automated tasks. It can be very simple like a bot that scraps price of certain product price from single website on daily basis or very complex system that acts almost like human. Think about artificial intellect that powers robots in Sci-Fi movies. It can be advisor/concierge/virtual assistant app like Siri or Google Now or a robot trading on financial markets. We target to list both final products – bots that are doing particular tasks and technologies and tools that facilitate creation of bots.