Why Chatbots Suck – The Startup – Medium

FB Messenger Commerce bots and Google Assistant went big, nearly every company released its own bot and Amazon Echo Dot and Google Home Mini became top holiday gifts - chatbots and assistants finally became mainstream in 2017. Perhaps you've already used one for getting store hours, fixing your internet or even buying a spare turkey. Although chatbots made dramatic improvements in NLP, their biggest shortcoming is that they're still scripted and handcrafted; nothing more than a glorified IVR or worse, a query based search. Sway too far from the script and you get the dreaded'I don't understand the question'. To understand why chatbots suck, you need to understand how they're built.