Google recently announced on it's AI blog the advent of a new age of chatbot. Meena has been trained on 2.6 billion parameters gathered from a vast variety of data sources but why is this important for conversational AI and conversational commerce? In any meeting, the ability to control and influence the conversation gives you power over the outcome. If conversations are automated, the best ones will deliver the best outcomes for those who create them. This is the reason there is such an arms race in this field.

Look around you; most people are heads-down, looking at their phone, whilst at the same time ordering anything from coffee to a train ticket. They are semi-aware of their surroundings and hooked within a messaging communication application window of some type on their device. Messaging windows are everywhere, and the rate of use and number of options available are both intensifying. Whether we like to admit it or not, messaging interaction platforms are contributing to our daily mobile screen time. They are the only applications we allow into our lives intrusively through notifications, and the only type of application we truly want to spend our precious time in.