What comes after smartphones and apps?
Chatbots, according to Microsoft.
In this week's Bloomberg Businessweek cover story, Microsoft revealed its plans to go all in on chatbots, or programs powered by artificial intelligence that can help you do mundane tasks like book a flight or schedule your finances. The company will give more demos of its experiments with chatbots starting Wednesday during its annual Build developer's conference in San Francisco.
Chatbots are a growing trend in the tech world. Amazon's Echo speaker has a built-in digital assistant called Alexa that you can talk to and use to order items online, get traffic and weather alerts, or control your music. Facebook Messenger has a chatbot called M that can do just about anything for you, even prank your friends. And there are several smaller apps and services out there like Magic that act as virtual concierges.
Related story
According to Bloomberg's profile, Microsoft's big push into chatbots is the first major project dreamed up exclusively by Satya Nadella since he took over as the company's CEO about two years ago. Nadella's vision is that chatbots are "more natural for people to get things done" instead of having a separate app for each task. Nadella will show off new tools developers can use to build chatbots at Build, according to Bloomberg.
Microsoft's big push into chatbots could be motivated by the fact that the company pretty much missed the modern mobile computing trend dominated by apps. It was late with its Windows Phone launch, and developers pretty much ignore the platform; that world is owned by Apple's iOS and Google's Android.
Instead, Nadella wants to create an entirely new platform run by conversation, not apps you tap and swipe at on a screen. We're seeing the same thing with Amazon, which tried to muscle its way into the smartphone market with the Fire Phone in 2014, but the phone was a massive flop. Facebook is also expected to focus heavily on chatbots that work with Messenger at its F8 developer's conference in April.
Microsoft's first foray into chatbots didn't go so well. Last week, the company launched Tay, a Twitter chatbot designed to speak like a teenager. But Tay was flooded with abusive messages and eventually developed into a racist monster. Microsoft was forced to apologize and pull the plug on Tay.
