[Animats]

I know; I've been playing around with "Rasa", a chatbot system based on Tensorflow. All the ML part does is match up canned answers with incoming questions. Someone has to provide all the answers and a few questions for each answer, then look at errors from user input and manually classify them for retraining. The rest of the system is just a template system for implementing phone trees.

Interestingly, MIT's START questioning-answering system is pretty good.[1] That project started in 1993, before machine learning, and it's more "traditional AI". Try it and comment.

[1] http://start.csail.mit.edu/index.php