 I like big bots and I cannot lie so let me drop some truth on you gang. Bots are the word of the day and you're starting to see them absolutely everywhere. So let's dig into it. What is a bot? A bot is a piece of software that lets you do things. You type words into it using natural language, the software understands and then it does something and companies are already starting to use this to do everything from customer service to letting you buy a new pair of shoes. In fact you may have seen a couple weeks ago when Microsoft unveiled its new bot platform and it introduced it to the world using a teenage bot named Tay that you could interact with on Twitter. Unfortunately Tay turned out to be a huge racist. The more you interacted with it the worse it got. Microsoft was hugely embarrassed. It wasn't exactly the start to the bot revolution that some of us had been hoping for. But sashay away Tay because there's a new bot maker in town. It's Facebook and this week at the FA developer conference in San Francisco they told us exactly what they have in mind. We think that you should just be able to message a business in the same way you'd message a friend. So today we're launching Messenger Platform so you can build bots for Messenger. And it's a simple platform. It's powered by artificial intelligence so you can build natural language services to communicate directly with people. So Facebook's big idea for bots is that they belong inside Messenger. I thought we'd add a few of them to my Messenger and see how they do. So this is Poncho. Poncho is a weather bot or a weather cache to be more specific. And if you go ahead and ask it what the weather is apparently it will tell you. So you can see I've said what's the weather and it is asking me to tell it where I live. What about Bernal Heights? That's the neighborhood I live in. What do you mean? So I live in Bernal Heights. Is it in San Francisco, California? Totally. Its response to how is the weather in Bernal Heights is may I send you weekday morning weather updates at 8 a.m. So I'm now completely baffled by what's happening inside of this chatbot. All I wanted to know was the weather in my neighborhood and it sent me a picture of a cat on a treadmill and asked me what my New Year's resolutions are. That sounds like I made up a joke but that was my actual interaction with this chatbot. Good rule of thumb going forward, never ask a cat the weather. Let's see what it's like to order flowers. We can do the Barrington get well bear. You keep tapping it because you want to see it and then nothing happens. You can just see a badly cropped picture of a bear and some sugar cookies. What do you want the note to say? We'll just go with sorry I cheated on you with your best friend at your house in your garage while you were there celebrating your grandma's 100th birthday. Now what's my billing address? All right I'm just gonna say it. This is a completely exhausted way to order flowers. I would actually rather just call somebody at this point. So it's a cliche when a new technology comes along to say that it's not ready for prime time but in the case of bots they're really not even ready for like afternoon television. They're not ready to go on the Ellen show. I'd say they're ready for Adult Swim, Midnight TV, something you watch when you're a little bit stoned or drunk and not expecting very much. And that's surprising because bots are an old technology. It was 2001 when we were all adding Smarter Child to our AOL instant messenger and using it to look up movie times and the weather. And so the story with Facebook Messenger's bots really isn't how far they've come, it's how much farther they have left to go. What's the difference between a guitar and a fish? What? You can't tune a fish. I was going to say, I told that joke to my wife and she left me.