BotBeat: This week’s top bots news

VentureBeat’s Bots Channel tracks the most important news and analysis from the exploding field of bots and messaging. Each week, we select the top stories and present them in our free weekly newsletter, BotBeat. We include news stories by VentureBeat staff, guest articles from leading figures in the bots community, and a good number of posts from a wide variety of other outlets. You can subscribe to our BotBeat newsletter to receive this information in your inbox every Thursday.

Here’s this week’s newsletter:

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As we think about what’s ahead for chatbots this year, all signs point to what might be called conversational commerce 2.0.

So far bots have mainly facilitated one-to-one interactions. Think about booking travel, ordering flowers, or interacting with your favorite Messenger bot. If you’re like me, your use cases involve conversations between you and a service. That’s already so 2016.

Conversational commerce 2.0 will enable the people in conversations (more than one, unless you’re prone to talking to yourself!) to interact with one or more services — while they’re communicating via text or voice. So, while discussing lodging for a family reunion with my 50-plus cousins on Messenger, a chatbot would be eavesdropping and begin to offer suggestions about resorts, hotels, and Airbnb rentals in Liguria. Adding this type of structure and smart assistance to conversations will require a combination of chatbots, AI, and messaging.

Conversational commerce 2.0 has been hinted at numerous times over the past 12 months, and it’s a development whose time has come. Bring it on!

As always, please send news tips to Khari Johnson and guest post submissions to John Brandon. Be sure to visit our Bots Channel for comprehensive news on bots and messaging.

Thanks for reading,

-Blaise Zerega

Editor in Chief

P.S. Please enjoy this video of Lili Cheng, engineer and general manager at Microsoft, discussing recent advances in AI bot technology and how it affects consumers.

From the Bots Channel

How AI will transform your Wi-Fi

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5 industries ripe for human-machine learning

Machine learning has been a constant on tech trend lists for years. This year, it’s time to embrace what humans can learn by interacting with machine learning. As Google’s head of Machine Intelligence, Blaise Aguera y Arcas noted in a recent Medium article: “Machine intelligence will expand our understanding of both external reality and our […]

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5 Alexa skills to try this week

This time a year ago, Amazon’s Alexa had a little more than 100 skills. Today, there are more than 7,000, and new skills are being added fast. Last November, Amazon launched the Alexa Skills Marketplace to allow the owners of devices that speak to Alexa to share, shop, and enable skills on Amazon.com. Here are five […]

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Introducing the European Bots Landscape

Over the past half year, bots have been a widely discussed topic. Experts and the media heavily discussed all the possible benefits, the future, and the value bots could create for businesses and consumers. Arguably, the tipping point was Facebook’s F8 conference in April. Since then, many developers and consumers have massively experimented with bots […]

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How to build a better chatbot

The rise of chatbot technologies has not been the stunning success many people anticipated. The technology is now ubiquitous, but chatbots are more famous for their failures than successes. For instance, Microsoft’s Tay faced a wave of media scorn after the internet trained it to become a misogynistic racist in the span of a day. Less snarky […]

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Beyond VB

LinkedIn debuts new desktop version with ‘chatbots’, new search and more

After a short preview in September last year, and the small matter of getting acquired for $26.2 billion by Microsoft, today LinkedIn — the social network for the professional world with close to 470 million users — is finally unveiling its redesign of its desktop site, complete with a simpler, app-like look; a new messaging experience that appears as a pop-up on the homepage; and updated search features. LinkedIn said the new desktop version will be rolling out globally over the next few weeks. (via TechCrunch)

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Why Slack, Chatbots, And Freelance Workers Have Your IT Department Freaking Out

These days every company is a tech company, thanks to cloud technology, social media, connected devices, and yes, automation and artificial intelligence. (via Fast Company)

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Chatbots — an interview with Chris Messina, inventor of the hashtag

Chris Messina is a product guy, inventor of the hashtag, ex-Uber, ex-Google, and friend to startups. Oh, he also created his own personal bot (say hi) and set some time to talk with us about how he sees the future of bots… and humanity. (via uxdesign.cc)

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Google Voice Update Makes Google’s Messaging Strategy More Confusing

IN THE FALL of 2016, when Nick Fox, Google’s vice president in charge of messaging products, first showed me the new Allo messaging app, he started with a slide. “This is our overall approach and strategy to communications,” he said, pointing at a bunch of app icons separated into three columns. (via Wired)

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