I've found flights for you – your next travel agent is a chatbot

Friendly tech: Your next holiday may be planned by a chatbot, a piece of software designed to interact like a human.

In the Hollywood sci-fi Her the main character falls in love with a computer operating system called Samantha. It may still be far-off fiction, but humans and machines are steadily growing more and more alike.

The tourism industry is one area where so-called chatbots are springing up to improve customer communication.