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Hi, everyone, welcome to the A6NZ podcast. Today we're talking about guest bots. And to cover

that topic and all its wonderful glory we have with us, Benedict Evans, our in-house analyst and

expert on all things mobile and beyond. We have Connie Chan, our partner who covers all

things China, including messaging and payments and various threads

related to how these phenomena are playing out internationally, particularly in China.

And we also have, as a guest, Chris Messina, who is previously at Google. He's currently

at Uber and developer relations. He's widely credited with proposing the first use of hashtag

on Twitter, so you can blame him for that whole phenomena or thank him for it. And more saliently for this conversation, he's been a long-time

advocate of the open web and was an early proponent of Oath. This conversation was recorded

right after Facebook's F8 event last week. So it focuses on the news that came out around Messenger

and bots, a platform for bots as a lens to have a broader conversation about many different threads around bots, everything from chat as an interface, conversational commerce, just the topic of what comes next for messaging and mobile, and especially as computing moves into our lives in more diffuse ways. So let's get started.

Today we want to talk about bots in the context of yesterday's Facebook news. And I think we

should take a step back and talk about what that news is, but also more broadly, like, why are

bots in the conversation? And also just this, I mean, do you guys even agree with this notion

that there's like, it's like it was web and now it's apps and now it's bots?

And by the way, we should probably start by talking about what the hell it bot is in the first

place.

So, yeah, there's different ways you can come at this question.

...