This week Microsoft hosted its annual Build conference completely online. That meant streaming keynotes, panels, digital breakouts and workshops for developers. The company's investments in cloud and machine learning are starting to deliver real products. Businesses continue to be the main target of its software offerings -- things like Outlook, Office, Teams and SharePoint. Microsoft has been working to make its 365 services more powerful.

The court was established in 2017 in the eastern city of Hangzhou to deal with legal disputes with a digital aspect. In a demonstration, authorities revealed how the Hangzhou Internet Court operates, featuring an online interface with litigants appearing by video chat as an AI judge – complete with on-screen avatar – prompts them to present their cases. A black-robed virtual judge sitting under China's national emblem was heard asking in a pre-trial meeting: "Does the defendant have any objection to the nature of the judicial blockchain evidence submitted by the plaintiff?" READ MORE: AI-manipulated media will be'WEAPONISED' to trick military

The digital, always-connected world has created a new kind of client that bristles at the prospect of waiting and demands convenience. Live chats apps expedite your first contact with potential clients that visit your website and reassure them that you are available at all hours. Live chat apps also allow you to engage with and capture more information on your website visitors. That being said, integrating AI powered live chat apps into your law firm's website can give your firm a competitive advantage. If your law firm is successful at driving traffic, live chat apps can assist in converting those visitors into qualified prospects for your firm. In this blog post, we compare some of the best live chat apps for lawyers.

The laws will apply only in the EU for now, but it's possible these global companies will apply these laws elsewhere (Microsoft has already applied some EU regulations in other places.) Venezuela used to have an anti-government newspaper, but that was until the government made it impossible for them to get enough paper to print. So Venezuelans have turned to the voice-chat app Zello to spread news, get basic needs, and coordinate aid amid the country's political and economic crisis. Vice President Mike Pence said the US will be sending astronauts to the moon's south pole. Because there's tons of ice Pence says can be turned into life support and even rocket fuel.

Recent outages from some of the world's biggest companies, including O2 and Facebook, have raised questions over how prepared infrastructure is to deal with the latest technology. From the O2 outage alone, payments systems went down, car parking tech didn't work and transport systems failed. While there are significant developments happening every year in technology, we are still some way off seeing some of the much-anticipated tech that was predicted to have an impact in 2018. With the year coming to an end, it's time to look ahead at what we can actually expect from 2019. AI is going beyond attention-grabbing gimmicks and is impacting everything from HR processes to measuring stock in retail. This is where the most significant developments will be made in 2019.

From instant messaging platforms to AI-powered chatbots, chat apps have taken over the business world. This technology is used both internally for in-office and client communication and externally for customer service and sales automation. Now that chat apps have become ubiquitous, it's only a matter of time before we see new features, use cases and iterations of the software. We asked a panel of 12 Forbes Technology Council members what they believe the next phase of chat app technology will be. Here's what they had to say.

The BBC is "really worried" by a new tactic by fake news propagandists and fraudsters who are exploiting the rise of chat apps to spread false content carrying the broadcaster's trusted branding. The organisation has found itself repeatedly targeted by what appears to be a mixture of state-backed political activists, opportunistic fraudsters and malicious pranksters, who are grafting the BBC's famous logo onto false reports that are shared on the largely unregulated chat platforms. The trend represents a new dimension in the fake news threat and a major challenge to democratic processes and to news organisations in protecting their brand reputations. The BBC last week felt obliged to issue a formal warning after a clip purporting to show the BBC reporting on the outbreak of nuclear war between Russian and NATO forces in the Baltic went viral on WhatsApp and other chat platforms as a piece of breaking news. In other instances, the BBC's branding has been used to give a false sense of authentication to concocted election results, and in creating malicious news'reports' designed to damage corporate targets.

"Conversation is the command line of tomorrow," so asserted Daniel Harvey, experience design director at the SapientNitro marketing agency, speaking at the Interact UK conference earlier this month. The command-line interface (CLI) dates back to the 1960s and has long offered us an efficient way to have computers do our bidding, as long as the right syntax and grammar are in place. "It's very much the case where you can actually live in just Messenger and get everything done that you need to do." -- Daniel Harvey In our new world of chatbots, we are following right in line with the CLI, but without anyone having to type a word. From Siri to IBM's dear Watson, the conversational user interface is taking over where apps left off. Chatbots can interact with humans to learn what they are looking for and perhaps guide them to the correct place.

Chat is almost as old as the internet itself. But this year, investors and big tech companies alike treated workplace messaging as the next big thing. Slack announced a $250 million investment in September from Japanese tech company SoftBank, bringing its total funding to $790 million and boosting its valuation from $3.8 billion to $5.1. In June, rumors surfaced that Amazon wanted to buy the company for as much $9 billion. Meanwhile, Microsoft launched a new chat app called Teams that will eventually replace Skype for Business. Atlassian, the company behind the venerable workplace messaging app HipChat, launched a new service called Stride.

Many, perhaps most, online businesses now offer "live chat" as a customer service option. Rather than calling or emailing with your support questions, live chat means you can speak to a customer service rep via instant messaging. This option is convenient and easy, and customers like it: live chat has the highest reported satisfaction rating (73%) of any customer service channel. It's part of a wider trend known as conversational commerce that's set to transform the world of digital commerce in the years to come. The term "conversational commerce" was popularized by Chris Messina, then of Uber, in a 2015 post on Medium.com