In 1966, Gene Roddenberry imagined what things would look like in the twenty-third century. These science fiction writers are often cited as the people who shape the future; it is their imagination that drives geeks like me to code, improve and build. Robot vacuum cleaners (Hanna-Barbera, 1962), submarines (Jules Verne, 1870) and the humble automatic door (HG Wells, 1899) were all first seen in books and on television long before they ever entered our lives. Although we are not whizzing through the stars yet, one of the subtler technologies from Roddenberry's Star Trek is tantalisingly close to ubiquitous use. How many times have you seen a character in Star Trek using a mouse and keyboard?

We are at the very beginning of a fundamental shift in the way that humans communicate with computers. I laid out the beginning of my case for this in my essay The Hidden Homescreen in which I argued that as Internet-powered services are distributed through an increasingly fractured set of channels, the metaphor of apps on a "homescreen" falls apart. The first obvious application was in chatbots, but as new unique interfaces come online, the metaphor becomes even more important. To understand this shift, it's worth examining how platform changes have created entirely new businesses and business models. Two easy examples to look at are the shift to content distribution through social media and the move of Internet connectivity to mobile.

Despite the hype, there is a lot of work to be done before we can build conversational software. These are some notes about what interesting conversational software would look like, and what techniques we'll need to build it. It may be obvious, but I feel we have to point out that the giddy excitement around bots stems from being happy that there is something new to build/invest in/write medium posts about, and not from exciting new technology. For VCs, new platforms mean new opportunities to bundle and unbundle services, and new battlegrounds for the big players (likely leading to acquisitions). So even without real technological breakthroughs, there is at least some money to be made investing in bot startups.