In the beginning, there was a dial. Then man invented the television remote so he wouldn't have to get off the sofa. Then remote controls multiplied . . . A big step toward the hands-free couch potato arrives Thursday. The $120 Fire TV Cube is the first device to give Amazon.com's

Enterprises are tempted by the idea to create chatbots that do not require sophisticated UI design, support for multiple mobile platforms, long development cycles with the app store reviews, and expensive acquisition strategies to draw users into apps. But building a chatbot still, requires a careful planning to ensure meaningful return on investment beyond the bells and whistles associated with owning an intelligent chatbot. In this article, I will highlight the 6 components required to build an intelligent chatbot at the average market price at $60 per hour using the available developer tools today. Your chatbot will need a backend to handle messages from different channels and process them with NLP services such as Wit.ai, Api.ai or LUIS. Further, your backend will also hold all of your business logic and integrations with existing systems and will be used to build your conversational intelligence, so that you know how to lead the conversation with the user.

Data is unquestionably the domain of AI, but what happens when technology is asked to process and make decisions that are more creative in nature? For a human, understanding why certain images and text make more sense as a first interaction with a consumer rather than as a secondary or final interaction is almost second nature. A machine, on the other hand, needs to be told (or programmed) with this knowledge in order to be able to judge images and text and determine where they should appear along the journey, without relying on a human.