Recent developments

In 2011, Apple released an intelligent assistant called Siri as part of their iPhones. Siri was modeled to be the user's personal assistant, doing tasks such as making calls, reading messages, and setting alarms and reminders. This is one of the most significant events in the recent past that rebooted the story of conversational interfaces. During the initial days of Siri, users used it only a few times a month to perform tasks such as searching the internet, sending SMS, and making phone calls. Although novel, Siri was treated as a work in progress with a lot more features to be added in the following years. In the early days, Siri had many clones and competition on Android and other smartphone platforms. Most of these were modeled as assistants and were available as mobile apps.

In the same year (2011), IBM introduced Watson, a question answering system that participated in a game show called Jeopardy and won it against previous human winners, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. This marked a milestone in the history of AI as Watson was able to process open domain natural language questions and answer them in real time. Since then, Watson has been refashioned into a toolkit with an array of cognitive service tools for natural language understanding, sentiment analysis, dialogue management, and so on.

Following Siri and Watson, the next major announcement came from Microsoft in 2013, when they introduced Cortana as a standard feature on Windows phones and later in 2015 on Windows 10 OS. Like Siri, Cortana was a personal assistant that managed tasks such as setting reminders, answering questions, and so on.

In November 2014, Amazon invited its Prime members to try out its very own personal assistant called Alexa. Alexa was made available on Amazon's own product called Echo. Echo was a first-of-its-kind smart speaker that housed within it an assistant like a "ghost" in the machine. Although called a speaker, it was actually a tiny computer with the voice as its only interface, unlike smartphones, tablets, and personal computers. Users can speak to Alexa using voice, ask her to do tasks such as setting reminders, playing music, and so on.

Recently, in April 2016, Facebook announced that it is opening up its popular Messenger platform for chatbots. This was a radically different approach to conversational interfaces compared to Siri, Alexa, and Cortana. Unlike these personal assistants, Facebook's announcement led to the creation of custom built and branded chatbots. These bots are very much like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, but can be custom tuned to the requirements of the business building them. Chatbots are now poised to disrupt several markets, including customer service, sales, marketing, technical support, and so on. Many messaging platforms, such as Skype, Telegram, and others, also opened up to chatbots around the same time.

In May 2016, Google announced Assistant, its version of a personal chatbot that was accessible on multiple platforms such as Allo app and Google Home (a smart speaker like Echo). All assistants like Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Google Assistant have also opened up as channels for third-party conversational capabilities. So, it is now possible to make your Alexa and Google Assistant personalized by adding conversational capabilities (called skills or actions) from a library of third-party solutions. Just as brands can develop their own chatbots for various messaging services (for example, Skype and Facebook Messenger), they can also develop skills for Alexa or actions for Google Assistant. Apple's very own smart speaker, Homepod, powered by Siri, is slated to be released in 2018.

Parallel to these developments, there has also been major growth in terms of tools that are available to build and host chatbots. Over the last two years, there has been an exponential growth of tools to design, mock, build, deploy, manage, and monetize chatbots. This has resulted in the creation of an ecosystem that designs and builds custom conversational interfaces for businesses, charities, governmental, and other organizations across the globe.