I think they must be fairly confident that what they have is...

I think they must be fairly confident that what they have is marketable and commercially viable to move the delivery date forward by nine months. It was indicated that they had made some breakthrough discoveries and presumably it is this that has allowed the time line change.

In my feed of Conversational commerce and chatbot articles, there is a lot of talk of what might happen, how big the market is and how much money has been raised, but I am not seeing anything of real substance to share on this thread.

There is no shortage of text to speech chatbots and some using animation using the open source feeds from Google etc. But the real game changer is being able answer questions in real time and overcoming bandwidth limitations when rendering 3D humans. This should be where Crowd excel.

One of my pet peeves is when I get sent to read a car related article and the Chatbot asks me "What model of car are you thinking of purchasing".

In the real world, the guy in the Real Estate office is not going to come out if he sees me looking at photos in the window. He knows, that I am probably just passing time waiting for my wife to get her hair done and that if I am interested I will come inside the shop.

Even use of the basic technology is misunderstood and not used well at present.