[haylem]

Actually, they may not be the "next big thing", but they're still a pretty huge deal. Especially for IT and ecommerce support. The support sector is estimated to a value of a few trillions of USD / year in the coming years, because of the progressive shift of large cohorts of customers to the cloud.

The point is not to have chat-bots handle all cases, but if they can handle 80% of cases, which are generally trivial, then it'll good enough.

Of course I hate talking to a bot just like anyone else, and being cornered into a dead-end discussion with one, or to be in an infinite loop, or in a situation where the bot has no answer and does not offer another path to resolution. But, from a business perspective, it's a rather sound approach to have people go through a bot first rather than have every single complaint clog an inbox. It doesn't scale so well.

[ghaff]

And they're often essentially an alternative for a first-level support person who is reading off a script and may not speak English very well. So even if chatbots are a fairly sucky experience most of the time, so is frontline support a lot of the time.

[pidg]

HR support within organisations, too. I'm aware of some large organistaions currently investing in chatbots right now to help people find out how many vacation days they have left, find policies relating to their job etc.

Though this issue might equally be resolved by intranet search engines no longer being painfully bad (e.g. ones powered by Microsoft Graph).

[megaman22]

Why does that need to be a chatbot, though?

That seems like it should be something that could be a trivial CRUD website, with far less complexity.

[Bucephalus355]

Larry Ellison actually did a demo of an HR support chat bot at OpenWorld 2016 a few years ago.

He used the chatbot to ask what his 2016 salary was going to be after taxes :/

[sailfast]

Bank of America, GEICO, and other mainline financials have gone this route for most of their common questions (or so I've noticed - and for some reason they're all named random women's names).

It is extremely frustrating to use them because I usually only reach out when I require help with something complex, but I could see it being useful if your metrics indicate that question X is 50% of your phone time.