Bots are a reality, and its hard to separate your users and good bots (e.g., search) from the bad ones (brute force, fraud, scrapers, etc.). Ido Safruti and Ariel Sirota review how bots work, explain how to operate a few common bots, and, most importantly, show what you can do to detect and block malicious activity while enabling your users and good bots to work uninterrupted.

Conversational interfaces are a novel way to interact with computers. Human language is becoming the new user interface, bots the new apps, and personal digital assistants the new browsers. Lili Cheng, an architect who directs the Microsoft Research Lab behind Xiaoice and Tay, will reflect on human reactions to our bot counterparts.

Bots are able to automate human tasks for which there aren't APIslike contesting a parking ticket or applying for homeless assistance. Joshua Browder's DoNotPay bots have sliced through various bureaucracies since late 2015, vastly reducing the effort required to interact with government agencies.

Voice assistants like Amazon's Alexa have become compelling platforms for bot creators, and voice will become an essential part of any bot creator's toolkit as APIs for Siri, Cortana, and Google Now become available. However, translating functionality into voice user interfaces can be extremely difficult. We've invited Cathy Pearl, an authority on VUI design, to give an overview of the field.

Peter Skomoroch, an authority on data science and practical AI, offers a deep survey of the artificial intelligence landscape, covering recent developments, popular toolkits and services, and current thinking on strategies for AI.

The recent explosion of bots on communication platforms has rekindled the hopes of conversational AI. However, building intelligent and customizable bots is not just bottlenecked by NLP and speech recognition. Our biggest limitation is the inability to modularize the goals of human bot interconnection. Suman Roy explains why we need a layered architecture for bots to learn about us from data.