Part of a series on AI in everyday life, Steve Lohr explores the quest to end chatbot’s “spiral of misery.” The technology journalist notes that despite the fact that players including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle saw decent growth in their chatbot markets this year, frustrating user experiences—a bot can’t discern or misinterprets commands—continue to mar interactions with AI. Surprisingly, training customer service chatbots is the frontline of making AI more competent, due to the vast number of call centre recordings and text interactions available to data scientists—systems like GM Financial’s chatbot Nanci are moving towards 75 percent query resolution. And where will this newfound efficiency be deployed? Healthcare. AI can “help us move from reactive sick care to proactive, predictive and personalized care,” says Anthem.ai’s Rajeev Ronanki.