On Bots

The O'Reilly Newsletter is on bots ....  nicely done descriptions, mostly non-technical.   Worth it as an introductory read, or passing on to executives with links to more detail.  Also see my tab links to Bots, which cover a number of enterprise style applications.  By the Economist:

What's a bot?
A good bot is a marriage of low-friction interface and artificial intelligence. The interface lets a user ask a question, state a fact, or express a wish in text or speech. The AI takes familiar human language, extracts information from it, organizes it, and acts on it. 

2016 may become "the year of the bot." After a decade of texting and messaging on smartphones, consumers are comfortable with conversational interfaces, and AI has finally progressed to the point where it can offer useful responses to practical queries. 

Bots promise to inject information, intelligence, and online services into just about any scenario—a key underpinning of the Next Economy that Tim O'Reilly has described. Bots will give workers superpowers, make networks more accessible, reorder user experiences, and build new ecosystems. 

The Economist explains the commercial motivations for bots, and Will Schenk explains their technical underpinnings. .... "