Developer Digest 4

Brian and Ed cover the latest news in the development community including: Bots-bots-bots, .NET Core RC2, Project.json, and NativeScript. http://developer.telerik.com/content-types/podcast/developer-digest-4/ E: Hello and welcome to Eat Sleep Code, the official Telerik podcast. I’m your host, Ed Charbeneau, and with me today is my co-host, Brian Rinaldi. Brian, how’s it going? B: Hello, it’s going great. E: And today’s another Developer Digest episode, and we have some great articles that we collected from the web to share with you guys, and we post those on our Telerik Developer Network, and we’re gonna give you our commentary on those and then you’re welcome to go find those on our website, and read them or sign up for the newsletter. So, let’s kick things off with our first article by the always amazing Jen Looper. And she’s got an article called bots! bots! bots! And it’s pretty much about bots. So, like Microsoft, and Google, and Facebook, at their big keynotes this year, have all come out with their own bot frameworks. And it seems like 2016 is the year of the bot, right? B: Absolutely, in fact, I talked to somebody… This was a PhoneGap Day earlier in the year. They were telling me before things had really taken off, they were like, “Bots are gonna be the thing.” I guess they were right. So, it just really seems like it’s taken off. Every company is releasing a bot platform, people are writing bots left and right. I think it’s really cool. I think the reason probably is it’s easy to interact with. It’s just natural to interact with a bot if it’s done well, right? E: Yeah. In my opinion, I think some of the relativeness of bots and why they’re kind of making a comeback, and I say making a comeback, ’cause we’ve had bots in other chat platforms for years, but those things were always command driven, right? You always had to slash some command and then some parameters for that command and the bot may throw an emoji out or something. But now, we’ve got this machine learning from all the big software manufactures and it’s a lot easier to parse through natural language and figure out what people are talking about, what they’re discussing, and less reliance on the specific keywords to make a bot do something. You can kind of glean what the conversation’s about or what the question was, and the big companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook, are making APIs to help facilitate that stuff. B: Yeah, totally. And on that note, all of this blends together with not just bots that you type to, but also ones you speak to. Things like Amazon Echo or Google have their Google… I forgot what they called their one that they released at I/O, or announced there anyway [editor’s note: Google Home]. So, I actually have an article coming up about writing for the Echo. In that case, the commands are spoken. In the end, there’s really not a lot of difference because the commands are spoken but then translated into text that I then parse and respond to. And then I send back text and that text is just spoken. So, it’s effectively the same kind of thing as these bots, but I think you’ve noticed companies starting to add those voice assistants into just about every device that they have, and people like to use them. So, it’s one of those things that I’m always kind of skeptical of the next big thing, like wearables and VR and things like that. I’m a little skeptical that those are really gonna be quick to catch on. Wearables is obviously a market but it’s somewhat small. And VR still hasn’t proven that it’s necessarily useful to me. But this one, I think it’s so simple to interact with, and the ability to either just naturally type or naturally speak makes it just a no brainer. Find the full transcript on Telerik Developer Network http://developer.telerik.com/content-types/podcast/developer-digest-4/