The O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Recapping a revolutionary year in AI and bots, and looking ahead to 2017.

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I look back at 2016, a big year for bots that saw important developments in platforms, tools, and underlying AI.

We recap some of the biggest bot-related stories of 2016, including:

People want to use messaging interfaces!
Facebook Messenger, Kik, Slack, and Microsoft all made it easier for developers to create bots
The field of conversational interfaces exploded
Google’s open source TensorFlow library was a major accelerant for the field of deep learning
Developments in workflow bots from Smooch to PagerDuty
The emergence of god bots—Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Facebook M—and what they mean for bot discovery
Microsoft’s new Zo bot, which uses “guide rails” to steer conversations away from some of the controversies that plagued Microsoft’s Tay bot
The December introduction of Microsoft Teams

We also present our predictions for 2017. Pete foresees progress in more seamless payment methods, ways to monetize bots, discovery and installation, and bot-to-bot communication. I expect further development in the micro-features of bots and improvements in NLU. I also think we’ll see more large organizations deploying their first bots next year.