
Whatever happened to chatbots? - Animats
2016 was the &quot;year of the chatbot&quot;. Three years later, how are chatbots doing?
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AznHisoka
This article does a good job explaining why they were overhyped:
[https://blog.growthbot.org/chatbots-were-the-next-big-
thing-...](https://blog.growthbot.org/chatbots-were-the-next-big-thing-what-
happened)

Basically, people were too occupied with the fancy technology, and forgot
about actually solving problems. People want to get things done, and clicking
and choosing options in a GUI is already an very efficient way of doing so.

When they want to do more complex things, we don't want to talk to a chatbot,
only to eventually get an useless response like "Sorry, we can't do that
request online. Please call us" (if I wanted to call someone, I wouldn't be
using you!)

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fatnoah
I have a fair amount of experience in a related field, which is messaging-
based service and came to the article is spot-on. Some companies simply wanted
to map their phone support flows to messaging (yuck!) and others wanted to do
more pre-chat type of activities, such as getting basic information from the
customer. For these latter use cases, some level of "AI" was useful to let a
customer communicate with more natural language rather than having to enter a
specific number or keyword, but you still essentially ended up with an
analogue of a phone system.

In my case, a goal was better agent efficiency (i.e. fewer agents handle more
customers) AND happier customers. A sweet spot for these chatbots was for them
to handle specific interactions but not the whole conversation. For example,
handling some basic pre-chat information gathering, or in the case of an
interaction around rebooking a hotel stay, handling the date and room
selection when using a medium that supports rich messaging, such as FB
Messenger or iMessage.

Until we have fully conversational chatbots, it's going to be really hard to
have a solution that a) eliminates agents from the equation AND b) results in
higher customer satisfaction.

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quickthrower2
Well hello there Animats, how are you today? What can I help you with?

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taprun
Well, there are tons of chatbot popups when I visit websites.

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rajacombinator
They got btfo pretty hard by sites like this
[https://chatbot.fail](https://chatbot.fail) and others. But they’re still
around, easy to sell this concept to low IQ types.

~~~
Animats
Um. Yes. I've been visiting various sites selling chatbots. None of them use a
chatbot to sell their own services. Only one, IBM, even had a demo chatbot,
and despite using "Watson", it was dumber than some phone trees.

On the other hand, Alexa seems to be far better than most chatbots.

