Yep, basically. We had a few chatbot products for some pretty popular media brands, they noted little to no engagement. Alexa, on the other hand, seems to get engaged a lot, even though in theory it suffers from the same problem.
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)
I agree with the lukewarm results of chatbots in most applications.