To look at the layer of dust that's accumulated on your Amazon Echo speaker, you might think that chatbot technology has been around for a while. But driving everything from Amazon's voice-activated assistant Alexa to the bots bundled into Facebook, conversational interfaces have become familiar fast, and are still an emerging technology.
According to a recent study by Juniper Research, chatbots driven by artificial intelligence will redefine customer service by 2022, when they are estimated to save companies more than $8 billion per year. According to the research, that shift will represent a total makeover of how businesses function in...