Chat bots, conversation and AI as an interface

Chat bots tap into two very current preoccupations. On one hand, the hope that they can actually work is a reflection of the ongoing explosion of AI, and on the other, they offer a way to reach users without having to get them to install an app. One way to look at any given AI problem, in the crudest terms, is to ask whether solving this needs'general AI' or whether your domain is narrow enough and your solution broad and flexible enough that you can deal with a wide enough percentage of potential scenarios without having HAL 9000. That is, we're clearly pretty close to making a car that can handle highway driving with no human input, since the range of possible events is pretty small, but driving in central Rome or Moscow is an entirely different matter that needs an entirely different level of decision-making: what does that hand gesture mean? Hence, the challenge in plugging an AI into a'conversational' chat bot interface is that you don't have HAL 9000 but are in some sense pretending to the user that you do.