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In 2016, restless tech-industry forecasters enjoyed a rare moment of consensus: Whatever else might be coming next, everyone seemed to agree that bots would be a big part of it. The analyst Benedict Evans, in a representative essay, located a promising future specifically in chat bots -- conversational interfaces for artificial intelligence, designed to assist with particular tasks. Facebook, the year before, created a personal-assistant chat bot, and the company would soon open its Messenger app up to outside developers, who it hoped would create more bots to help people shop, look things up or otherwise organize their lives. Amazon's Echo, by then already a surprise mainstream success, provided a tailwind: Here was a widely used artificial intelligence just sitting there on millions of countertops. These predictions were self-interested, of course.