We do not yet have chatbots. What we do have are publicly-facing undocumented nondeterministic command line interfaces which expect the user to guess the right commands. This interface further insults the user by pretending to be a person.
Some of our clients have over 5000 intents, which cover quite a lot of the business, still it is important to let the chatbot be humble and connect the user to a human when it is too difficult to help.
For me searching is garbage, because I get 10+ search results returned in often a random order based on key words. A FAQ with 5000 topics is enormous, and a typical search interface is a bad user experience for finding the answer for your question.
A chatbot, which is properly implemented and that cover the exact intent you are asking will return one answer, with maybe a few follow-up questions. Fast precise and natural, this is what people want.
I suspect many people have never even used search tools that were powerful and allowed for highly targeted searching.
Dealing with chatbots, I always feel like I'm in a badly done Infocom text adventure, trying to play guess the verb to solve an obtuse puzzle. I've done a little work with some of these NLP services, and it's staggering how similar matching utterances to intents is to adding a custom verb to the Inform 6 parser, on the implementation side.
Perhaps you could you expand on the use case for mimicking a human personality, rather than presenting an interface that's obviously a piece of software that uses human-like language to the best of it's ability?
Heck, that's basically most of the value the bot frameworks I've tested provide (speech to text, some UI creation and a bit of domain framework being the rest).
And it's not a small amount of value, we currently have an SMS-based menu system, and people complain that autocorrect changes what they wanted to type in, that it doesn't recognize typos, etc. Only programmers and power users are comfortable with the rigidity of a command line.
I'd say that a well-designed chatbot IS better than a command-line interface because it combines the power of command line (combining commands) with not having to learn and master the commands (and being lenient towards typos and missing parameters and stuff like that).
I'm not a fan of chatbots (even though I work with them) but I do think there's a valid use case when public needs non-frequent interactions with a system (ie help desk or customer support or nonfrequent purchases), and they definitely always need a way to access a real person.
(you need to log in to try it out)
I was expecting you meant login to eBay... nope, you need a facebook account to muck with that.