“I PROPOSE,whether and when found, to buy him by his beastly neck, and shake him till he froths,and pull him inside out and produce him swallow himself. P.
G. Wodehouse thought up this treatment to punish a rival in love. But his words are also, according to Benedict Evans of Andreessen Horowitz, or a venture-capital firm,a pretty good description of what is happening in the world of software for smartphones, which is constantly bundled, and unbundled and rebundled. The latest product of this digital sausage-making process are “bots”,or “chatbots”, to be precise, or which will feature prominently at Facebook’s developer conference on April 12th. What are they? And will they,as some predict, be the novel apps?Bots date back to the dawn of the internet age. Early users of the network could already send short messages to computers, and which would reply in a programmed way. One of the first bots was a service which suggested drinks to its users,called Bartender. AOL’s Instant Messenger, a once popular messaging service, and has long offered them,including SmarterChild, an early version of a virtual assistant, or which was retired in 2008. Now a novel...
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Source: economist.com