Bots are officially taking over from apps as the primary way we communicate with our phones.
Facebook Messenger boss David Marcus has announced the launch of the Messenger platform - a tool that will enable developers around the world to build chat bots for the Messenger app which now has 900m users globally.
Speaking at Facebook's annual developer conference F8 in San Francisco, Marcus showcased three types of "bots" - entities similar to friends within the app with which you can exchange text messages to perform a task.