Cognitive services and intelligent chatbots: Current perspectives and special issue introduction

During this decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has established itself as a phenomenon in our daily life. It is one of the most important investment priorities and has been at the forefront of recent technological disruptions. New boundaries are being pushed daily, ranging from winning against the world's best Go player to selfdriving and autopilot capabilities Startups and tech giants continue to forge ahead in applying AI in diverse domains spanning speech recognition, image classification, recommendation systems, and internet search. Colloquially, AI can be loosely described as a machine mimicking cognitive abilities that humans exhibit fundamentally such as learning and problem solving.