This. Making a chatbot isn't difficult. Making a competent one that users can comfortably interact with is extremely difficult.

I do agree it is hard. As per usefulness, Customer service industry can use it in a pretty good way. Also i think they are fun :)

What would you gain over a well organized FAQ page?

QWe can always switch to a customer service executive if we sense something going bad. Or the Chatbot not able to get the intent it has been trained for.

How does this beat a simple form of FAQ with a floating action button to get some help?

Its not only FAQ based bots that we intend to remove. It won't serve many purposes. Customers call banks to know about their balances. Or retail Customer care to know the status of order. Once I saw a chatbot use case where chatbot recommended dresses if we talk to it in a natural way. For example: "I have to go to a Christmas party today " and it handled this...

We are only limited by our thinking on how to create them.

Customers who call banks to know a balance hit an automated system. The kind that end up calling instead of checking online/ an app AND end up needing an operator don’t use chatbots

Same with your retail example.

And a million others.

And take your second example, with dresses.

What kind of events does it understand? There has to be a limited number of event types it knows, it’s awful that there are infinite types of events, the bot understands practically none of them compared to infinity, and you have to guess how to frame your query to fit in its bag, instead of having a list with a search box for event types.