Question: I've seen a large amount of hype around chat bots, but is there any evidence that "normal" people really use these for anything more than novelty, excluding the realm of Amazon echo et al.
Completely anecdotal - a non-programmer at my work used a chat bot provided by their ISP to help them with some internet connectivity problems. I was surprised too.
I might postulate that programmers have more of an aversion to chatbots than the general public. Presumably because we tried one of the famous general purpose ones at some point - then were disappointed when we failed to make it understand why humans cry and why it is something they could never do.
Chat bots would make new and prospective customers FAQs/enquiries easier for lots of small businesses, especially in emerging markets where a large swath of people are coming online for the first time via their mobile phones.
Many of these users are not that familiar with the WWW aspect of the Internet; Facebook and Whatsapps is really the Internet for them.
I'm not sure if this would pass a security review, but occasionally I've had some issue with a bank or credit card account, I've then used the chat-based technical support, and the conversation was very straightforward.
I could definitely see chatbots becoming advanced enough to handle "I'm locked out of my account and need some part of it reset" type questions within the next 3 - 5 years. I could even see it being superior to the current experience (right now there are significant delays after each thing I say to the customer service person, presumably because they're handling multiple chat windows simultaneously).
I might postulate that programmers have more of an aversion to chatbots than the general public. Presumably because we tried one of the famous general purpose ones at some point - then were disappointed when we failed to make it understand why humans cry and why it is something they could never do.