[formercoder]

Has anyone ever interacted with a chat bot to which they did not just type “agent” until they got a human?

[ganstyles]

I have. I typically type "representative" until I got a human.

[hummerbliss]

Swiggy (a deliver app in India) has very nice bot feature for handling most of the queries.

You don't have to type but select from bunch of choices and then the bot automatically does the needful.

Examples

Report an item is missing from the order. The bot pops ups the list - asks the user to select which item is missing - refunds automatically.

for most use cases I would rather have the bot do the work for me than having to talk to a rep.

[koolba]

That’s even worse because you have to squirm through seven variations of the same question to get to a live person.

It’s like chutes and ladders with the wrong answer taking you back to the start of the bot time waste loop.

[smsm42]

I usually give them an honest chance. I think over the years I've had one or two that were marginally useful. Most of course are of the type "let me run search on what you typed on the background and regurgitate links to site's pages that match". Or fixed menu ones like "if you have $NOT_MY_PROBLEM, press 1, if you have $ALSO_NOT_MY_PROBLEM, press 2, otherwise press 'tough luck'".

[gnicholas]

I have the Drift widget on my site and a decent chunk of people seem intent on trying to figure out if I am a bot or a person. I haven’t yet come up with a sure-fire way to prove personhood quickly, so we can move onto their actual questions.

[jaxn]

We have a dialog flow bot in our customer service chat. It resolves about 1/4 of chats successfully.