Consider this: 76% of consumers want to purchase by messaging with a business. Unless you have an army working in your marketing and customer service departments (and let's be real, that's a far cry from the usual reality), catering to that statistic is too overwhelming to manage. With Spectrm, you can give your customers an impactful messaging experience without a ton of personnel, all while boosting your sales. It's called conversational marketing automation, and it's changing the game. Not only do three-quarters of consumers want to use messaging to shop, but a staggering 89% of consumers want to connect with brands over messaging.

What makes a conversation good? It's a question you may or may not spend a lot of time thinking about, but it's something you instantly recognize when it happens. A great exchange cuts through the noise and arrives at the heart of any matter without the trivial small talk. Engaging chats emerge as a natural byproduct of people talking with each other -- not at one another -- in a genuine dialogue. When a fantastic conversation ends, both parties leave happier and better off for taking the time to chat and learn in the first place.

Alan Turing's famous test of whether machines could fool us into believing they were human – "the imitation game" – has become a mundane, daily question for all of us. We are surrounded by machine voices, and think nothing of conversing with them – though each time I hear my car tell me where to turn left I am reminded of my grandmother, who having installed a telephone late in life used to routinely say goodnight to the speaking clock. We find ourselves locked into interminable text chats with breezy automated bank tellers and offer our mother's maiden name to a variety of robotic speakers that sound plausibly alive. I've resisted the domestic spies of Apple and Amazon, but one or two friends jokingly describe the rapport they and their kids have built up with Amazon's Alexa or Google's Home Hub – and they are right about that: the more you tell your virtual valet, the more you disclose of wants and desires, the more speedily it can learn and commit to memory those last few fragments of your inner life you had kept to yourself. As the line between human and digital voices blurs, our suspicions are raised: who exactly are we talking to? No online conversation or message-board spat is complete without its doubters: "Are you a bot?" Or, the contemporary door-slam: "Bot: blocked!" Those doubts will only increase. The ability of bots – a term which can describe any automated process present in a computer network – to mimic human online behaviour and language has developed sharply in the past three years.