Chatbots in China over WeChat act as a lightweight Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, which is highly successful due to a set of market factors which are (at least from my perspective) unique to China.

But, as I've been saying for about a year now, chatbots, in their current incarnation, don't make a lot of sense outside that niche.

Looking at it from either the American or Japanese perspective, there are a set of expected standards for customer support, which are either already met via web-based mostly-automated systems (Amazon is really good here), or by being able to directly chat with a human being (perhaps supplemented by AI) to solve a very specific and usually uncommon need.

Replacing that setup with nothing but a text-based IVR system is a non-starter for any company that wants to remain in business.

Hence, it was a natural progression to allow payments to businesses which is where chatbots came in.

Perhaps i'm a strange case, but the only times I or anyone I know have ever had to use support are for these cases.

If an issue is common, its not an issue for support, its a failure of ux or design