Tony Lucas, of converse.ai, just sent me an email alerting me to the existence of his company, so I went to take a look. I am surprised to see that this startup so completely overlaps with what I wrote about here:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smashcompany.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;what-happens-when-the-board-of-directors-begins-to-panic" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smashcompany.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;what-happens-when-the-b...</a><p>Not many people realize the difference between simple NLP and the kind of NLP that is supported by a Conversation Finite State Machine.<p>And I am about to start a totally new startup that is focused in the same space.<p>So it seems likely that we are about to see a whole wave of conversation-via-nlp startups, a bit like the Social Media wave that we saw 5 years ago.