[hchasestevens]

Could you expand a bit on the niche you see them filling? I think some of the negative perception of chatbots recently owes a lot to exactly what the OP said - gross overapplication in areas with very marginal benefit, if any, to user experience (e.g. why do I want to interact with your service though an opaque natural language interface versus less ambiguous search controls/interface?).

[megaman22]

Chatbots are coming off the peak of inflated expectations, down into the trough of disillusionment.

I suspect many people have never even used search tools that were powerful and allowed for highly targeted searching.

Dealing with chatbots, I always feel like I'm in a badly done Infocom text adventure, trying to play guess the verb to solve an obtuse puzzle. I've done a little work with some of these NLP services, and it's staggering how similar matching utterances to intents is to adding a custom verb to the Inform 6 parser, on the implementation side.

[olavgg]

I wouldn't say niche, there are hundreds of use cases. I believe we have just scratched the surface of possibilities yet. I think you could say, in every situation you would ask a human a question you could also ask a chatbot.

For me searching is garbage, because I get 10+ search results returned in often a random order based on key words. A FAQ with 5000 topics is enormous, and a typical search interface is a bad user experience for finding the answer for your question.

A chatbot, which is properly implemented and that cover the exact intent you are asking will return one answer, with maybe a few follow-up questions. Fast precise and natural, this is what people want.