Forget delivery times and style recommendations – how would you like to chat to a bot about prison statistics and police brutality? Sandy Speaks is an art project and chatbot that aims to increase education and transparency about prison, surveillance and the Black Lives Matter movement.

The number of people using messaging apps is set to hit two billion by 2018, so it’s no wonder brands want to get in on the action. Major tech players are touting chatbots as the next big thing, but can they really revolutionise online interactions, or are they just part of an industry-driven pipe dream?

Email is dead – that’s what the tech industry has been saying for the last decade. Yet hundreds of unread messages clutter workers’ inboxes every day. Slack aims to increase productivity by improving communication and transparency across entire businesses. Could this really be the end for email?

Slack began life as a tool to cut down the number of internal emails sent each day, encouraging real-time, conversational communication between colleagues. But users have gotten creative and now Slack is being used as a publishing tool by names like Al Jazeera andTheNew York Times.