recent “bot-mania” is at the confluence of two separate trends... agent AIs steadily getting better... the US somehow still hasn’t got a dominant messaging app and Silicon Valley is trying to learn from the success of Asian messenger apps... The thesis, then, is that users will engage more frequently, deeply, and efficiently with third-party s…

 There are hundreds of playful, creative, smart people building useful and insightful and silly bots online.These are ten of them that our data and my editorial judgement suggests you should know.  These are the bot influencers most-followed by the bot community itself.

Microsoft is trying to create all kinds of bots with different personalities, which would become more realistic, and presumably less irksome, as they learned from repeated interactions with users... They’ll act as your interface with computers and smartphones, helping you book a trip or send a message to a colleague, and do that through a conversa…

bots — or “chatbots” — are an increasingly trendy model for software.This new obsession came on fast. But why? Where did these bots come from? Who is building them? What for? Is a fake conversation better than just clicking buttons? You’ll be hearing a lot more about bots soon, so here’s an overview.... bots won’t kill apps anytime soon. It’s more…

The main Topics this time are language technology, mobile innovation and EU communications, with a few extras to catch-up since the last edition.

To get a better grip on the questions that bots raise... organized a workshop that brought together a diverse group of bot experts. This article is the output of the event, a tour of the bot and its semi-autonomy from three perspectives: that of the designer, the implementer, and the regulator... The last several years have seen a rise in bots …

BotOrNot checks the activity of a Twitter account and gives it a score based on how likely the account is to be a bot. Higher scores are more bot-like.

in the new news business that old saw is getting flipped: messaging is the new medium... Readers are fatigued by apps... overwhelmed by the torrents pushed out on social networks. What newsrooms ... are realizing is that the place to reach readers these days are messaging apps... already reach more than 2 billion people worldwide

Bots are to modern messaging apps what APIs were to Web 2.0; a way to build on top of other services, experiment, and create a new way of interacting with existing services... what inspiration can we draw from the past that might help us to think about designing Conversational UIs?

Howdy, a bot company devoted to automating common workplace tasks. Its product lives in Slack ... operates in the background, listening for the keywords and questions that will activate its powers. ... automates meetings, asking what people are working on, collating their answers, and distributing them to the team ... take your lunch order ... AI…

Every business in the world will have a bot. It will allow any customer to talk to them in the simplest way possible, sending a message.

The chatbot you can find on my example Hub is a pale imitation of what Beta users should get.