Talk — 8 December 2016
A lunch talk on what chatbots are, where they fit and why they will matter alongside apps, held at DHBW Lörrach for the connect Dreiländereck IT-Experten Lunch.
The talk
Since Mark Zuckerberg presented Facebook’s new Messenger Bot Platform at the F8 developer conference in 2016, bots had become a big topic among developers. My talk explained what (chat) bots are, which uses suit them especially well and why they would play a more and more important role next to apps in the following years. Practical examples and development platforms gave the audience a starting point for building their own bots.
It was one of three short talks at the lunch event: apps, (chat) bots and a third topic around virtual reality, augmented reality and location-based services. The talk on apps came from Prof. Dr. Erik Behrends of DHBW Lörrach.
The venue
The Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg Lörrach was founded in 1981 as a Berufsakademie and became part of the DHBW in 2009. Students alternate between study phases and practical phases at a partner company, and the university counts roughly 2,000 students and more than 750 partner companies. It sits in the Dreiländereck between Germany, France and Switzerland, and the talk took place at its Hangstraße campus.
The organizer
connect Dreiländereck is a regional IT initiative for the districts of Lörrach and Waldshut, run by Wirtschaftsregion Südwest. It raises awareness of IT and digitalization among companies, institutions and municipalities and offers a platform for exchange and networking. Its IT-Experten Lunch was a compact format: a few short talks on one topic, questions from the audience and networking over lunch, free of charge.
The event page
connect Dreiländereck has since redesigned its website, and the original event page is no longer available there. The Internet Archive still holds copies from October 2016.