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A few years ago, chatbots were supposed to take over as a leading way to interact with the internet. They would live on our phones and in our messaging apps. Whenever we needed anything, all we had to do was type out a question.
Things are turning out ... differently.
Chatbots, bots, virtual assistants and agents are all about the conversational UI — about interacting with a computer through natural-language words and sentences.
The conventional wisdom used to be that the chatbot revolution would be driven by pre-emption, interjection and agency, as exemplified by Facebook M and Google Now.
Instead, the killer features are hands-free voice interaction and ubiquity — the main strengths of the Amazon Alexa platform.