From Hype to Disillusionment
Like any other trend, the chatbot trend has been subjected to hype. In April 2016, Techcrunch had published an overly optimistic article about Facebook Messenger and the chatbot technology, which was about to make humans obsolete.
As of October 2017, it seems that we have already entered a phase of disillusionment.
In fact,
The problem is mainly due to the approach most companies took. They were focusing too much on the so-called intelligent assistant using AI technologies like Natural Language Processing to make chatbot understand every user request. However, the state of art of NLP is nowhere near to get enough accuracy which resulted in massive user deception.
Media Reaction
In fact, as this other article points out, Facebok chatbots often bombed and delivered disappointed experiences. It is instructive to see how quickly things can become hyped and then fail to deliver.
According to The Guardian:
Please, Facebook, don't make me speak to your awful chatbots
Unable to parse any instruction that doesn’t fit their (entirely undocumented) expectations, slow to respond when they are given the correct command, and ultimately useful only for tasks which are trivial to perform through the old apps or websites.
Facebook's new chatbots still need work
Trying to use the bots for simple tasks — like finding out if it would rain or buying a black shirt — was frustrating, disappointing and ultimately far less efficient than simply visiting the company’s website itself.
And for Gizmodo :
Facebook Chatbots are Frustrating and Useless
The problem is that most Messenger chatbots are dull conversationalists, so most of my chats sound unnatural, punctuated by moments of frustrating silence. I spent more time trying to guess what these little bots wanted to hear then actually talking to them.
Brown ... highlights the almost never-ending complexity of getting robots to converse. “If people think that they’re talking to a person, they’re more likely to be casual or natural,” Brown says. “It makes the problem of receiving that information dramatically more difficult.”
The problem is that most Messenger chatbots are dull conversationalists, so most of my chats sound unnatural, punctuated by moments of frustrating silence. I spent more time trying to guess what these little bots wanted to hear then actually talking to them.
Brown ... highlights the almost never-ending complexity of getting robots to converse. “If people think that they’re talking to a person, they’re more likely to be casual or natural,” Brown says. “It makes the problem of receiving that information dramatically more difficult.”
Still, chatbots have not died. The ones that seem to deliver are those that are focused on a specific use case and are conscious about being bots, and not Intelligent Assistants - that's a different game
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