If I see functionality like this on a company's website, I am going to find someone else to do business with about 80% of the time.
It's also 10x worse when the website has a green circle on it like teams/zoom showing it as "online" and makes you feel like you are actually talking to someone.
I personally fell in love with copilots when all my engineering tools started adding them (e.g. Cursor IDE, Warp terminal, etc.).
And really, I wanted to tap into artificial intelligence everywhere, from excel to planning a vacation in AirBnb. "is this a good place to stay with a young kid?"
Just in recent months, the market has validated this intuition, e.g. Microsoft Copilot products (think 2nd-brain-on-tap for e.g. PowerPoint, not support chat) have boosted productivity by 30%, with lots of other impressive metrics
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If you do go back to the customer support use-case, I'd see the support agent's software using CopilotTextarea, to let them reply to 10x more messages, but where they still drive the conversation.
Though I could see it coupled with AI chatbot on the consumer side, where it makes sense
but having been on the other side, requests like yours are the exception. support chatbots relieve a huge load, allowing the real people to work on real requests like yours rather than the numerous junk ones.
Chat interface is used to talk to people. If you talk to a machine, there is no point to mimic human behaviour, especially when current iterations of AI can't reason. There should be a better way to do this.
Like 90% of the time I want to chat to customer rep, because I want to let them now there were missing items in the delivery and I want re-delivery or refund. That could be a simple expert system with a few buttons. But businesses want to discourage people from returning anything, so they are building those time wasting widgets hoping a % of people give up.
Like if my time costs £200 per hour and the wrong delivery was worth £50, I am not going to spend more than 15 minutes on this, unless it is critical to the business.
This has nothing to do with helping customers, but to save money.
But I think you do bring an interesting point, that chat interface is just one type of way to talk to computers, and in some sense it's the "laziest" way, since it's what we use to talk to people now.
The Textarea is actually an example of another non-chat way to "talk" to the AI intelligence. I do think we'll see a lot more being discovered by the community over the next 2 years (and we'll build those into CopilotKit, of course)