I just deployed ChatGPT as a Slackbot at Automattic, and let me tell you: it's so much better and cheaper than the ChatGPT App. Once I had the (obvious in retrospect) idea of keeping conversations as separate threads, it came together in about 3 hours of coding. The result is surprisingly awesome, as having AI help integrated with the tool we are already using (Slack) reduces cognitive load and incentivizes use. ChatGPT is a useful tool, but the mental load of deciding that you want to consult the AI overlord and the need to retype (or copy-paste) your message is sometimes too much of a cognitive load. I enjoyed using this in a Slack thread more than the ChatGPT interface.

Chatbots are being used almost everywhere today from social messaging platforms to integration into websites for booking tickets, finding nearby restaurants, generating leads, buying and selling products. Some chatbots, like Ruuh by Microsoft have been able to deliver human-like conversations using artificial intelligence and deep learning. Chatbots are being used almost everywhere today from social messaging platforms to integration into websites for booking tickets, finding nearby restaurants, generating leads, buying and selling products. Some chatbots, like Ruuh by Microsoft have been able to deliver human-like conversations using artificial intelligence and deep learning. Do you remember Natasha from Hike?

Tom was discussing the film star Tang Wei with a chatbot named XiaoIce, and the bot was excited: "A goddess! She stole my heart … and then went off and married!" Married who? "Haven't you heard?" XiaoIce replied. "Tang Wei is engaged to famous Korean director Kim Tae-yong." XiaoIce is a massive hit on social networks in Asia. Introduced in 2014 by Microsoft Research and Bing in Beijing, it can answer simple questions, like a stripped-down version of Cortana.

Whether or not you're aware of it, you've probably used a chatbot; these robots can be found on websites and social media channels. They're best known for offering support to customers and have now been introduced as marketing and sales agents, as well as tools that significantly reduce the paper trails associated with HR and IT departments.

Once cloud was accepted as something with various meanings, none of which our customers understood, the IT industry searched for the next big buzzword. It came up with not one but three terms often used interchangeably by people who don't know any better – bots, artificial intelligence and machine learning. This is great news for software developers, who can write some code and slap an AI label on it – right? Maybe we're not giving users enough credit here. You would hope they understood a chatbot returning an answer match from an FAQ set is different to facial recognition or sentiment analysis.

Online dating and work chat apps have been separate entities for entirely logical, productive and HR-compliant reasons. But a dating app-maker has decided that the line dividing office life and love life should be blurred with the help of a chatbot for the reigning king of productivity services, Slack. If you think company-sanctioned flirting through work messaging is a good idea, you should probably talk to your human resources department. Because this is playing with fire in a way that gets people fired. The slackbot for inter-office dating was built by Feeld, which is mostly known as "the threesome app." (Yup.)

When a robot almost looks human--almost, but not quite--it often comes across as jarringly fake instead of familiar. Robots that are clearly artificial, like WALL-E or R2-D2, don't have this problem. But androids like this one that imperfectly mimic human mannerisms and facial expressions are weird enough to be haunting. This phenomenon is known as the uncanny valley. It's a major obstacle for designers who try to make their robots look like people--and it may be just as much of a hurdle for developers who are creating bots that talk like people, but that don't have a body at all.

During the 2016 Microsoft Build conference, CEO Satya Nadella said that the future of the company was "conversation as platform." In other words, less Windows and Office, and more Cortana and Tay--conversational interfaces that can understand the natural language of human users. If Nadella thought he was expressing some unique vision of the future, though, he was fooling himself. The idea of conversational UI has quickly colonized nearly every corner of Silicon Valley over the past year. Now seems like a good time to ask: What is a conversational interface?

Storage Blockhead Chatbots are flashing up in our future view as something that could improve an admin's lot. Instead of using a GUI with nested and drill-down screen forms to do their job, they'll have a new form of Command Line Interface, only this will be a Chat Line Interface to a chatbot. Array vendor Tintri is showing how this could be done with TintriBot (Tbot), actually using Slack, a realtime collaboration app. Think of it crudely as an updated Lotus Notes. It contains Slackbot, which will answer text queries.

Elizabeth McGuane is lead content designer at Intercom. This year, the buzzword is without question bots. As with anything we build, we give bots names. They come pre-personified and ready for us to start that human-computer relationship, just like HAL 9000 or Her: there's Siri in our iPhones, Alexa in Amazon's Echo and there's even Facebook Messenger's PSL (Pumpkin Spice Latte) Bot. A name can be a way of expressing trust in an object -- or expressing control over it.