Chatbots are dead. A lack of AI killed them.

If a chatbot falls alone in a forest, does it make a sound? Given that basically no one uses chatbots, does it even matter? Chatbots were all the rage with the media but never caught on with developers or the consumers they serve. As Digit's Ethan Bloch has eulogized, "I'm not even sure if we can say'chatbots are dead,' because I don't even know if they were ever alive." While Bloch is right to say that "No one can point to a chatbot that'all your friends were using'" as "Such a thing simply never existed," once upon a time many pundits pointed to chatbots as the future of commerce, social, and just about everything else.