REUTERS/Jim YoungMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella.
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.
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.
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