We've held number-one market share in North America for four straight quarters. And as Synergy reports, we had nearly 20 points higher share than our nearest competitor in the most recent quarter. Here are six things we foresee for the customer care industry in 2018. Many businesses need to provide care, but not necessarily from a formal contact center. This includes small and midsize companies, but also teams within larger organizations.

DALLAS TEXAS, Nov. 2, 2017 – AI-powered voice assistants are changing the way we live. Hundreds of millions of people use these assistants regularly to check the weather, wake up on time, and find their way around town. Yet there have been no virtual assistants to help us at work-- until now. Today at Cisco Partner Summit, we announce Cisco Spark Assistant. It is the world's first enterprise-ready voice assistant for meetings.

MindMeld has pioneered the development of a unique AI platform that enables customers to build intelligent and human-like conversational interfaces for any application or device. Through its proprietary machine learning (ML) technology, MindMeld delivers incredible accuracy to help users interact with voice and chat assistants in a more natural way. At Cisco, we believe that AI and machine learning will play an increasingly vital role across all parts of our business. Given our industry leadership in networking, collaboration, data center, analytics, and unified communications, we are uniquely positioned to take advantage of AI and ML and embed it across the network and the cloud. Cisco is unlocking capabilities through AI that were unthinkable in the past – for example, empowering our customers to self-manage their network and data center, stay ahead of security attacks, embed intelligence at the edge, deliver predictive analytics, and revolutionize the workplace.

My dad got me my first computer for Christmas when I was 11 years old. It was a Texas Instruments 99-4a. He must have gotten it second hand because it had no box or any form of storage like a tape drive. I had been obsessed with the movie War Games, so my first program on the TI was designed to replicate the computer in the movie which uttered the famous line "shall we play a game." My program gave static responses to a huge variety of programmed questions, and mostly followed the script from the movie.

It is really fascinating to see how chat bots can automate contextual conversational interactions. According to Casey Newton from The Verge "Bots are here, they're learning – and in 2016, they might eat the web", which seems to be very realistic because there are thousands of bots out there and more are being developed that increase productivity, simplify the user experience, or are just for plain entertainment. The majority of the bots as of today are simple commands to automate daily tasks. However, Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered bots are the future -- you can build natural languages as services to communicate directly with customers to order food for example, and even pay for items entirely through it. AI stuff is bubbling with the explosive growth of social messaging, there is a real opportunity here to wire-up and manifest the bot to ride the bot wave.

Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) has announced a partnership with Gupshup and API.ai with the purpose of creating a fully integrated cloud-based collaborative service. The announcement was made during Cisco Live! 2016. Following this announcement, we expect to see thousands of bots quickly joining Cisco Spark and Cisco Tropo platforms. The collaboration will also turn up the intensity of competition between team communication chat apps, the likes of Slack and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)'s Skype. Before Gupshup became an enterprise messaging service company in 2010, it had created an SMS social network of more than 50 million users, mainly in India.

Cisco announced a partnership Monday with bot-building platforms Gupshup and API.ai that allows thousands of bots to quickly join Cisco Spark and Cisco Tropo platforms. It also turns up the intensity in competition between enterprise team communication chat apps like Skype and Slack. The announcement was made during Cisco Live, a four-day Cisco event taking place in Las Vegas this week. Gupshup built an SMS social network of more than 50 million users, mainly in India, before becoming an enterprise messaging service company in 2010. Today, it processes four billion messages a month.

Chat bots have been around since the'early days' of the Internet. I remember using them in mIRC, ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger in the late 90's in my high school days. Admittedly, I had no vision about their future potential and just thought they were cool. At the time, I was more interested in the network than the bots. I believe, what returned chat bots to the headlines is the Internet of Things ("IoT"), the evolution of Enterprise Chat, thanks to companies such as Slack and WeChat, and improvements to Artificial Intelligence ("AI").