In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, I speak with Dennis Mortensen, founder and CEO of x.ai, a personal assistant bot that handles meeting scheduling through email.

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I talk with Richard Socher, chief scientist at Salesforce.  He was previously the founder and CEO of MetaMind, a deep learning startup that Salesforce acquired in 2016.  Socher also teaches the “Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing” course at Stanford University. Our conversation focuses on where deep learning and NLP are headed, and interesting current and near-future applications.

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Ben Brown, co-founder and CEO of Howdy.ai, the bot toolmaker behind the Botkit framework. Brown also runs the Talkabot conference, which was held in Austin this past September.

The problem confronting a modern campaign manager is similar to the problem that any marketer encounters: how to spend finite resources to reach the right people and convince them to act. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, I talk data strategy with Andrew Therriault, chief data officer for the City of Boston. He was previously director of data science for the Democratic National Committee and is the editor of a free O’Reilly ebook called “Data and Democracy: How Political Data Science is Shaping the 2016 Elections.” We talk about how data is changing today’s political campaigns—particularly the way that campaigns now determine which potential supporters to target with phone calls, mailings, and door-to-door contact.

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I recap O’Reilly Bot Day, held October 19, 2016, in San Francisco. The event gave us a good picture of what the bot community—and bot landscape—looks like, and the diverse group of attendees conveyed a strong sense of optimism about bots. Slides from Bot Day presentations are available here.

Customer service is a key application for bots—one of the first that we think of when we imagine a world full of AI-enabled conversational interfaces. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I talk with the founders of two companies that have developed bots to help consumers and companies talk to each other.

The workplace is a rich venue for bots that help with productivity and collaboration. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I focus on workplace bots. We begin by talking with Jassim Latif, head of partnerships at Slack, about bots written by outside developers for scheduling, organizing meetings, and managing human resources. “We’re building toward a future where the value of these apps and services that people are building on top of Slack far outweigh the value of Slack on its own,” Latif says.

Something remarkable is happening in the world of artificial intelligence. At the O’Reilly AI Conference in New York, people weren’t just talking about AI as a far-off dream; they were talking about AI as something that exists in real products today.

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots podcast, I talk with three artificial-intelligence practitioners about the real practice of AI: Hilary Mason, Jimi Smoot, and Roger Chen.

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE Labs at Microsoft Research. Cheng’s team is responsible for the Microsoft Bot Framework. She’s also a speaker at O’Reilly’s upcoming Bot Day on October 19, 2016, in San Francisco.

Cheng talks about Microsoft’s experimental bots and their goal of making conversations playful and engaging. We also discuss the importance of designing good dialog; the potential of workplace bots; and Xiaoice, Microsoft’s popular Chinese chatbot. We also reflect on the fate and significance of Microsoft’s Tay bot.

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Andy Mauro, co-founder and CEO of Automat, a startup whose tools make it easy to build AI-powered bots. (Disclosure: Automat is a portfolio company of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, a VC firm affiliated with O’Reilly Media.) Mauro will be speaking at O’Reilly Bot Day on October 19, 2016, in San Francisco.