_You_ don't communicate like this, but the reviews & chat logs at my company are proof that people 100% do type like this. A lot of older people are really just looking for someone to talk to it seems, so yes, they will type out 90%+ fluff to just return an item.

You wouldn't believe some of the things people say to conversational interfaces.

A long time ago – I'm talking early 2000s – I designed a voice UI for a train timetable information system. It was a phone line, you called it up, told it where you were travelling to and from, and it gave you the information you needed.

After launch, I would listen to the odd call at random to see how it was handling things. I distinctly remember one case where, when asked their destination, the user said "I'm going to a funeral".

Now, when somebody said something outside the scope of the expected responses, we would reprompt them up to twice more with a bit of extra guidance. I'm proud to say that, even though this caller started way off course, the system steered them back and they ended up going away with the information they needed.

That's actually a danger of making your conversational interfaces too human-like - people then talk to them like they're humans, and it doesn't go well. You're better to make things a little stiff and robotic, so as to manage their expectations and make them understand that they need to constrain their answers a bit to get what they need. It might feel less natural, but everybody goes home happier at the end of the day.

It's, of course, made up. But everyone can appreciate the anguish of having to talk to someone like this and trying to discern what it is they actually need. Macy, the Macy's chatbot? They can go through hundreds of terms that correlate with resolutions in milliseconds. if chatMessage.contains?(typoOrExactMatch('exchange')) then chatSession.initiateExchange() end

Like the grandparent explains, some people just need a way to explain what they need in their own words and I don't think chatbots completely fail at that. The best one's I've experienced have prescreened me for common issues and then sent me off to a live person as soon as it was clear my request was not easily addressed with the built in script.