Whether it’s ‘Hey, Cortana,’ ‘Hey, Siri’ or ‘Alexa, play Mozart,’ consumers are becoming quite comfortable having conversations with smartphones, computers and even cars via personal intelligent data assistants.

“Over the next five or 10 years, almost all software will have some sort of conversational element built in,” said Ben Brown (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of XOXCO Inc. Brown’s company is the creator of Botkit, an open-source toolkit for building conversational user interfaces, including chat bots and voice skills for personal assistants.

To talk about bots talking back to us and how developers can write for them, Brown recently joined John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during the Cisco DevNet Create event in San Francisco, California. (* Disclosure below.)

Machine learning and writing for bots

Similar to all software development that came before, no one person ever wrote every line of code for a mobile app, Brown explained. Nobody had to define what a “button” was for iOS; that was done at a higher level. In the same way, people who are building conversational apps today are composing their own code, combined with third-party services and open-source software, including tools from Brown’s company, he added.

Because of the maturation of machine learning, developers are able to take advantage of much more sophisticated technology much earlier on in the process. For the last 10 years, Brown said people have been talking about machine learning, saying, “Isn’t it great if you’re Google and you have 10 trillion data points?”

Since no other enterprise had that many data points, it was considered a pointless discussion, Brown stated. But it is now possible. A developer can begin on day one training their bot with machine learning and models.

While machine learning and artificial intelligence had been mostly in the realms of academia and research in the past, today, “It’s on my kitchen counter. … My kid now uses an NLP [Neuro-Linguistic Programming] technology every day,” Brown concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Cisco DevNet Create 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Cisco DevNet Create. Neither Cisco DevNet nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE