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Grab your phone and look at the screen. Now, count how many messaging apps you currently have on your phone. The chances are very good you have at least one and as many as five or six. Can you say the same for any other type of app? Do you

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence “Payments Briefing” subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. American Express introduced an “Add a Card” feature to its Amex Bot in Facebook Messenger, which will enable eligible US consumers to make purchases on the social media website. These card members

Though artificial intelligence experts may cringe at the portrayals of humanlike AI in science fiction, some researchers are nudging us closer to those visions. “I think it’s useful that your user interface not only understand your emotions, your personality, your tone, your motivations, but that it also have a set

Facebook Messenger bots (chatbots) are a controversial feature that was added to the standalone Messenger service earlier this year. Recently, Facebook started allowing its Messenger chatbots to take payments – making the interaction between chatbot not only a customer service feature but an e-commerce feature. Jes Stiles of Search Engine

Salesforce on Tuesday released LiveMessage, a chatbot that lets enterprises users engage customers through messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, SMS or MMS directly within its Service Cloud. Service agents can respond to customers on Facebook Messenger after accessing their records, for example, and the conversation automatically is appended and

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. Businesses are beginning to see the benefits of using chatbots for their consumer-facing products, according to a survey by Oracle. The survey included responses from 800 decision makers including chief

The rise of chatbots has been cited as one of the main social media trends of 2016.  With Facebook recently announcing that it has enabled payments via bots in Messenger, we can expect to see even more companies getting involved in the new year. For now, let’s take a look

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. On Monday, Microsoft announced a new Microsoft Ventures fund dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI) investments, according to TechCrunch. The fund, part of the company’s investment arm that launched in May, will back startups developing

Microsoft has officially unveiled its AI chatbot Zo, and a series of bot-building applications all geared toward improving machine communication. Many major technology companies are locked in a race to build the best AI assistant, and interest in chatbots has intensified. Conversational agents feature heavily in Microsoft’s AI strategy, and

Microsoft’s journey with chatbots started in May 2014 in China with Xiaoice. She has over 40 million users — more than the entire population of California. And she averages 23 conversation turns per session with users — nearly 10 times the industry average. Xiaoice is the first AI chatbot to

At the Mall of America in a suburb just south of Minneapolis, shoppers walk 1.15 miles just to make their way around a single level of the sprawling shopping destination visited by 40 million people every year. And with multiple floors in total comprising around 5.6 million square feet of

Not many people will be sad to see the back of 2016. So, why not take the opportunity to look onwards and upwards into the year ahead? We’ve asked some industry experts for their predictions on social media trends in 2017. The people offering up their opinions are: Kirsty Price, senior

Is artificial intelligence and conversational computing the next great frontier in IT? Microsoft believes so; the company is bullish on AI and is doubling down on opportunities it sees for the technology. At an event in San Francisco, Microsoft paraded a multitude of technologies focusing on bots, the Cortana personal

What are chatbots for? I asked Zo, Microsoft’s officially launched chatbot, currently available on the Kik Messenger app, what she does — and she was remarkably coy in answering this question, initially complaining that our conversation felt like a job interview and then qualifying this hugely with the intimate confession that “our convos give

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence “E-Commerce Briefing” subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. Nordstrom launched its first chatbot on the Facebook Messenger and Kik messaging services to help holiday shoppers find gift items, Geek Wire reports. The chatbot helps users select gift items by asking