[ehnto]

I wonder how necessary it really is for a conversation to be involved at all, if the bot can only have a set range of outcomes then what benefit over the traditional dial tone based selection does it add?

It feels a bit like moving the car aircon controls to a digital touchscreen display, sure it sounded like progress, but it really just made things more ambiguous and harder to use.

[Drakim]

For the same reason Siri and Ok Google isn't just a long menu of 500 options.

Having a tone dial menu works as long as there are only a few places to route you, and as long as all situations only have a handful of answers.

Furthermore, you can have tricks like looking for keywords in your human speech to make sure the guy you get patched to has the expertise to help you. If you say "my router won't turn on" you won't be sent to a password reset monkey.

At least, that's the theory.