Chat Bots vs Live Agents: The impact on the customer experience

In my world of customer experience design, there is a lot of talk currently around Chat Bots and conversational user interface experience. Leading global powerhouses are currently directing energy and resources toward experimenting with specific Chat Bot experiences for different user groups. However, because they are effectively just an intelligent technical interaction, customers are not actually engaging with a real person. Whether customers prefer to talk to a robot or a human (and if they actually even notice), and how this affects the customer experience has been a debatable issue. Some companies and commentators are dead set against the idea -- they wholeheartedly believe that speaking with a robot is undesirable and the chat equivalent of talking to voice prompts on the phone (you know, the ones that inevitably end up repeating -- 'I'm sorry, I didn't get that.