No matter how many people know better, there are plenty more that don't.

To be fair though, I'm annoyed by human first level support for similar reasons most of the time but at least escalation/problem solving with them is easier than a bot that explodes when you go off-script. I think, personally, that making me talk to your fancy answering machine is just devalueing. If a company wants my business they should have human support and pay them enough to work with the customer.

This assumes that people who have a question they need answering will consider searching for an answer or getting to grips with the UI first, rather than heading straight to ask customer support. That's often not the case. Long before support chatbots became widespread, telephone trees made a point of telling every single user in the queue the help section of their website existed...

Agree bots should often make it easier to escalate and should default to escalation rather than blowing up[1], but if a large proportion of your queries are actually answered by telling people the FAQ page is a thing, it's a bit difficult to justify paying humans to do it.

[1]if escalation takes a couple of minutes for a response escalation and blowing up might be indistinguishable...

What portion of the chat pop up windows do you think are purely bot? Might any of them be purely human?

1) The bot initiates the conversation and your initial message gets sent directly to an agent. This is the older model that's in most common use today.

2) The bot initiates contact and based on your responses does some simple keyword matching and delivers help article links where possible or asks for more information IVR style, then when it hits an "I don't know" point or if the agent option is selected, offloads to an agent.

3) This is my favorite style, honestly: The bot initiates the interaction, and does some machine learning backed AI chat, all the while the interaction is monitored by an agent who can take over at any time. Similar to #2, if the bot hits a sticking point, it'll just queue to an agent. This unfortunately is the least common of the implementations.

4) This is the most modern and is becoming the industry leader: Fully AI bot trained against a veritable Everest of chat conversations for that entity/industry, only offloads to a human when you shout "HUMAN" at it enough times or if it gets really stuck and confidence intervals start falling rapidly.

NOTE/DISCLAIMER: I design and implement these systems for a living, and we don't often get much say in the customer-side UX, so I'm sorry if you've gotten stuck with an arguably bad build!

(Edit: formatting)

Nobody will notice, you know you want to add it ;).

That's my assumption and if I'm not in a rush, pretty ok with it.

But yes, some of them are contact boxes for real people.

Or, as you did, just say something that puts them off script.

I don't know about that. Does Amazon's support use bots? Or are they just in a remote call center using auto translate to communicate with customers?

Because in general, they appear like bots to me: they will parse for key words and reply to those, ignoring context and subtle differences that make their replies sound weird.

Depends on the section of Amazon. AWS enterprise support does not.