Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened? – The Startup – Medium

We look back at our breathless optimism and turn to each other, slightly baffled: “is that it? THAT was the chatbot revolution we were promised?”... chatbots didn’t just take on one difficult problem and fail: they took on several and failed all of them...
A great bot can be about as useful as an average app. When it comes to rich, sophisticated, multi-layered apps, there’s no competition... Today’s most successful bot experiences take a hybrid approach, incorporating chat into a broader strategy ...multimodal apps, where you can say what you want ... and get back information as a map, text, or even a spoken response...
a bot that does ONE thing well is infinitely more helpful than a bot that does multiple things poorly...
We love optical displays of information because we are highly visual creatures... Conversational UIs are meant to replicate the way humans prefer to communicate, but they end up requiring extra cognitive effort.... built to replicate the way humans prefer to communicate — with other humans. But is that how humans prefer to interact with machines? Not necessarily.