I think the problem is framing, or essentially what is a “chat bot”.
20 years ago “artificial intelligence” where taboo words for anyone hoping any funding. It would be called ‘expert system’ or ‘automated agent’ or whatever else that didn’t make people show you the door.
I think what you put as “chat bots” is having the same issue. The concept has been deployed at super large scale and people interact with bots everyday, it’s just not marketed as such.
Currently my phone company, my ISP, my health insurance company, the last airline customer support I had to deal with, they all process a crazy amount of interactions, and all the basic steps were clearly handled by a bot until I got escalated to a human. They are all real world huge scale applications, I don’t know by what other metrics they would be deemed as “failures”, and I don’t think they plateaued, I expect it’s still growing.
Human operators on big operations where already bound to a script for years now, and the “human contact” part was mostly spelling letters and numbers over the phone.
I’m more than happy it switched to chat, and both sides can deal with the exchange asynchronously, in particual with the bot handling the requirements to open the user info.
I feel it’s actually a win-win situation, as incredible as it seems regarding customer support technology.
20 years ago “artificial intelligence” where taboo words for anyone hoping any funding. It would be called ‘expert system’ or ‘automated agent’ or whatever else that didn’t make people show you the door.
I think what you put as “chat bots” is having the same issue. The concept has been deployed at super large scale and people interact with bots everyday, it’s just not marketed as such.
Currently my phone company, my ISP, my health insurance company, the last airline customer support I had to deal with, they all process a crazy amount of interactions, and all the basic steps were clearly handled by a bot until I got escalated to a human. They are all real world huge scale applications, I don’t know by what other metrics they would be deemed as “failures”, and I don’t think they plateaued, I expect it’s still growing.