But that kind of chatbot is surely an exception. And Andrew Ng is the chairman of WoeBot, so I expected it to be good quality.
What I find utterly annoying is a chatbot popping on some software webpage, reducing my field of view and interrupting my progress toward the documentation/download/career/whatever section. In this case I find it an overly hyped widget that I absolutely do not need.
What could have been a traditional application form has been made significantly better by a contextual chatbot. It's also definitely better than talking on the phone.
I guess the meta learning is, if the answers are discrete values and the follow up questions are contextual, chatbots can be great.
And I wish people would stop saying their bots have AIs. I've had more meaningful conversations with a dog than a bot. :)
Most of the websites that employ these are using it in some form of an IVR Anyways when I end up calling such sites I get stuck with IVR.
And I like it better to type than pressing numbers on the phone and listening to that automated and slow voice.
I've used chatbots multiple times. Its just that they are flow specific.
Chatbots can be useful, but this just wasn't the case for our audience (which is very mainstream oriented)
Every time I encounter one, I backtrack and search for a phone number or email or twitter or anything else. To me, chat bots are an opaque interface on top of a flowchart with no discoverability. Might as well just give me the damn flowchart.
I feel like chatbots are an innovation in the field of cost reduction for businesses, but a huge step back in terms of customer experience. What are your opinions?