After seeing how Google's Duplex AI was able to book a table at a restaurant by fooling a human maître d' into thinking it was human, I wondered if it might be possible for us mere hackers to pull off the same feat. What could you or I do without Google's legions of ace AI programmers and racks of neural network training hardware? Let's look at the ways we can make a natural language bot of our own. As you'll see, it's entirely doable. One of the first steps in engineering a solution is to break it down into smaller steps.

I can't remember the last time I called someone on the phone to place an order for pizza. Papa John's told investors during its first-quarter earnings call that 55% of its total sales now come through digital. Sixty percent of those digital transactions came from mobile devices. Competing pizza chains Domino's and Yum! Brands' Pizza Hut are also investing heavily in e-commerce. Both have invested in ordering methods for smartwatches, connected cars, and video game systems.