Abstract: The dialogue system has become an important human-computer interaction interface in artificial intelligence. Chatbots technology plays a vital role in the development of dialogue system technology and represents the frontier development of dialogue system technology. In this paper, we analyze the emerging of chatbots and recent trends in chatbots. When introducing the research progress of chatbots technology in academia and industry, special emphasis is placed on the three key technologies of chatbots. They include multi-turn response selection model in retrieval-based chatbots, response generation model in generation-based chatbots and dialogue model based on deep integration of retrieval and generation. The future development is prospected by analyzing the problems in the chatbots technology.