Conversations as Platforms

Abstract

Have you ever had the experience of ordering pizza using an application that remembers your favorite pizza and orders to your current location automatically? Or have you ever booked a cab just by typing in a chat window or by using voice inputs and had a cab show up at your door step? If you have seen either of those, what you have experienced is the new generation of smart applications called bots (a short form of robots). Bots provide richer and more personalized experiences in our day-to-day activities, thereby making our lives much better. If you have not experienced this firsthand, you have yet to witness the next revolution in IT after the worldwide web, mobile, and data. Bots are much smarter than mobile applications; in some cases they can be smarter than you. Bots are designed to perform human-like interactions and exhibit human-like intelligence. Chat bots are not new; we have had platforms that help build chat-based applications for quite a few years (like Skype SDK), but what makes the new generation of bots special is their integration with artificial intelligence.