THE TALKING CURE

Like tens of millions of teens across the world, 15-year-old Emma rarely surfs the web or tries out new apps. Instead, she conducts her digital life through a collection of social apps, from Facebook to iMessage to Instagram to Snapchat. On all of them, she’s messaging. “There are always messages for me to check,” she says. And though she picks up her phone every 15 minutes or so, her friends still complain that she’s slow to respond. We are all becoming like Emma that way: Recent studies show that Americans use their phones to message far more than anything else. Increasingly, companies eager for our attention online have to be part of these conversations. And increasingly, they’re doing it through chatbots.

Computer programs that talk with (and like) humans, chatbots appear as voice-controlled assistants (such as Siri