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I agree, a lot of chatbot projects seem to be built because of the hype + the team also gets to dabble with some "AI/ML." I think there are very few conversational agents or chatbots today that people use regularly, and of those I honestly don't think many people enjoy using them.

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I'd much rather have a plain old index of help questions and answers than a chatbot to deal with.

Building bots is hard: there are few tools available of any sophistication, leading to a vicious cycle of trial and error (with users getting the worst of it).

Remember what the first websites looked like? Everyone was just making it up as they went along. We're in a similar situation today.

And you know what? Some people are pining for those sites nowadays. The fact that you can write rich, computation-heavy applications and serve them over HTTP in a browser is amazing, but that doesn't mean every website needs to be a rich, computation-heavy application.

Same with chatbots. They might have some valid use somewhere, but most of the ones I have seen so far are just there for the sake of being there.

Sure, but past performance is not a predictor of future results. Just because many of them are built poorly today doesn't mean they have to be built that way.

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