[lacampbell]

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.