Digital Wealth Manager Moneyfarm Acquires Tech Behind Fintech Chatbot Ernest

Another acquisition of a standalone bot. Clear indicator that--if nothing else--NLP training data is quite valuable and can buy you *a lot* of speed to market. To quote Chris Albon, “Machine learning and deep learning are 99% open source. The competitive advantage is in the training data.”

Chatbots are Coming to HoloLens - and They'll Help Workers Make Better Decisions

A riveting development in the quest for chatbot use cases that can truly impact business. With Hololens’s focus on real-world training and guides for IRL tasks and procedures, it makes perfect sense for companies to extend their bots to this channel. Talk about in-context support! 2019 can’t come soon enough

Facebook Messenger Wants To Give Retargeting A Makeover

An interesting turn in the path towards monetization for Messenger. “Sponsored Messages” are coming, in an effort for brands to leverage Messenger for a broader range of activities within the customer journey, beyond just awareness or engagement. You know, people actually buying stuff in chat. Curious to see how they skirt the fine line of spamminess. 

Facebook David Marcus Interview: Wants to Replace iMessage

Not to dwell too much on Facebook, but this is very promising for anyone in the bot world who’s building bots for big brands. It reveals their commitment to driving b2c communication into Messenger, and interestingly enough encouraging users to adopt it for its search functionality. "The one thing I really want to get rid of is the need for anyone to ever have to call a 1-800 number again," says David Marcus. Boy do we agree!