Are chatbots dead?

Chatbot's in the original definition (natural language processing, not sure if they're human or robot bots) are dead imo.

I think it's a perfect example of developers wanting something to be a thing but the user experience being so far off the mark it's just not getting real adoption.

The instant people realise they're talking to a bot that's pretending to be human the interaction totally changes for the worse.

It's the same thing as the natural language phone bots that try to understand what you're saying and direct your call to the right department etc. Everyone knows they're talking to a machine and they have to change the way they speak to try to get the result they want and get very frustrated when the thing doesn't do what they want.

But the phone bots that use a keypad, people just use those to get where they need to go.

I believe it's a similar thing for chatbots. The real value isn't in trying to pretend to be human, it's in using them as a funnel to get the right information from them so you know how to serve them best.

They are an excellent way to collect info that would previously be collected in a very boring and dull web form or to help people find the answer they are looking for before having a real person need to take over

Conversational UIs and natural language processing is too hard.

Part of the "command line for everyone" hype made sense in developer's heads, but which non dev do you think actually uses the command line?

Too early to say probably, but I definitely think chatbots were over-hyped as I don't see the massive adoption that was predicted a couple of years ago. I think Digital Assistants (Alexa etc) are still doing nicely though

While its true that the initial hype around it has declined, I dont think the tech can no longer be of any use.

Chatbots are ultimately only one of the many interfaces you can use to be of service to your customer.

Not everything...not yet (in Batman voice)

See chatbots were way too overhyped anyways and were meant to decline as a trend because the tech to pull it off is simply not there. There are two issues with the tech - firstly, NLP which can effectively break down intents and extract the action keywords doesn't work like it should. Secondly - responding to those intents and actions require highly flexible functional software system which is hard to build - imagine the kind of cases you would have to handle.

So I think even the initial hype momentum and adoption curve was driven because of two things - minimalist UI which affords less cognitive load and secondly familiarity of interface - everybody uses one or more messaging applications. It should have never been about 'talking to some AI which will answer all your queries' because we are simply not there.

Right way to look at it is to view it from a slightly meta level Human Computer Interaction principles which can be derived from the use case of chat bot - instant gratification through interactivity, realtime live feel and fluid dynamic ui. So in my opinion conversational interface is all about building an abstraction layer on top of existing apps and use cases as a means of interaction. Software already talks using APIs which are to and fro messaging and it does abstract away complexity of the underlying system. But it it has fixed endpoints mapped to fixed functionality - nothing more, nothing less.

So chat bots is a specialised use case of bigger technological trend which lays emphasis on more real time, message based, interactive, easy to use, platform independent - software layer which enables exchange of information and value which can be human to human , human to software, one to many or one -to-one.
It is like the modernist design philosophy of 'form follows function' - but here the 'function follows interaction'. Voice assistants are a great example of this.

Pst - You can listen to me talking about conversational interfaces on this podcast (https://serfo.com/p/podcast-e01/). Also I'm founder of https://serfo.com which is a small software company building products in this space. Our first product is Contlo which lets you build Conversational Forms.

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