What's great about living and working in Austin, TX is the abundance of meet-ups and learning opportunities. My day job at Watson involves helping to market Watson Conversation. Sure I understand the terminology and have experience using our API, but I wanted to develop a deeper understanding of the chatbot scene here and learn the latest advancements. That's where Talkabot comes into play. Talkabot are meetups, conferences and community around bots and conversational software hosted by Howdy.

The hype over A.I. and bots shows no signs of simmering down, thanks to accelerating investments, a developer "gold rush," and the ease of building bots. According to Pandorabots, there are more than 225,000 bot developers and upwards of 300,000 bots in existence today. However, a rush like the one to create bots is usually backed up by consumer demand. In this case, there's little to no demand in the form of customers asking brands to adopt bots. In fact, based on BJ Fogg's behavior model, for consumer behavior to shift, the bot needs to be easier to use than the activity it's replacing.

The hype over A.I. and bots shows no signs of simmering down, thanks to accelerating investments, a developer "gold rush," and the ease of building bots. According to Pandorabots, there are more than 225,000 bot developers and upwards of 300,000 bots in existence today. However, a rush like the one to create bots is usually backed up by consumer demand. In this case, there's little to no demand in the form of customers asking brands to adopt bots. In fact, based on BJ Fogg's behavior model, for consumer behavior to shift, the bot needs to be easier to use than the activity it's replacing.

To both kick off and maintain relationships and also spark ideas I've found Charlie App to be useful, it does a lot of the googling for you if you are doing some research on a contact. My brother, Tristan, and our little sister's boyfriend, Will, and I set up our own company, Howdy Hub, to help build powerful connections. LinkedIn is a remarkable vault of human professional interconnectivity but it tends towards making a link only after a physical meeting. We complement LinkedIn to allow people to discover others around them at meetups and conferences or when joining a new community. Howdy is developing artificial intelligence to recommend who is a match for your professional needs.

If you haven't really noticed, the past couple of years have been big for cloud/internet based productivity tools. The reasons could be growth of tech entrepreneurship and most organizations moving towards a BYOD culture. The three major areas where most of these productivity tools have impacted is communication, co-ordination and collaboration. This is a huge market. There are plenty of those useful productivity tools one can use to work better.

You may have heard that "conversational interfaces" are the new hotness in digital product design. Why open and close a bunch of apps on your phone to get stuff done when you can invoke a text-message-like window and just say what you want done to a chatbot? Well, here's one reason: what if the bot is annoying or tedious to talk to? In conversational UIs, personality is the new UX. "We want people to enjoy dealing with our software, but now we have a very limited palette with which to design the experience," says Ben Brown, co-founder of Howdy, a "digital coworker" chatbot that runs within the office communication tool Slack and automates things like project-status meetings and taking lunch orders.

The first bot I ever befriended went by the name of GooglyMinotaur. The Minotaur appeared in 2001 to promote Amnesiac, the latest album from Radiohead, which was and still is my favorite band. I happily chatted with the Minotaur about Radiohead history, information about the band's tour, and the MP3s it offered for download. The Minotaur was popular among fans like me: 1 million people added it as a friend, and in its lifetime it sent more than 60 million messages. But the Minotaur died a few months after it appeared, along with the rest of the era's bots. The entire field seemed dormant for more than a decade.

Virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana and Google Now have become a fixture in many people's daily lives, helping them get driving directions, find phone numbers and search the Web using their voice. Now a crop of savvy users have found ways to use those tools at work, too. Virtual assistants can tackle a range of workplace tasks, such as scour emails for important information, send reminders about future appointments and set up meetings automatically. Thanks to big data and artificial intelligence, assistants are better able to understand the way people really communicate and are beginning to anticipate their needs. According to Gallup, nearly two-thirds of working adults say they don't have enough time in the workday to complete what they set out to do.