Bots with Jon Bruner

Over the next few years, bots will pervade our lives more and more. These smart, conversational text interfaces provide a new way of engaging with the computer systems that we have been mostly interacting with through web and mobile app interfaces for the last decade.

Bots are a necessary complement to the voice interfaces of the future, because we don’t always want to talk to the computer, and natural language processing is not yet good enough to always translate our vocal request accurately. Bots are not toys, they aren’t trivial, and they aren’t going away any time soon.

Jon Bruner is the host of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, a show that has quickly become one of my favorites because it covers both theoretical and applied artificial intelligence, while remaining approachable to listen to. Jon hosts it with Pete Skomoroch, who works on a bot startup full time. Jon and Pete were also organizers of O’Reilly Bot Day, which I enjoyed tremendously and got a lot of knowledge from.