I don't think chatbots have to necessarily be a "void". Most of the ones I've seen are on support pages -- such as Microsoft's Virtual Assistant:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Nh0Nn

Anyone who is dealing with this chatbot is probably aware of its main scope -- to provide tech support/answers. Look at the example prompt that is given: e.g.: Reset my Microsoft account password

How try to find that on the Microsoft Support page as it is:

https://imgur.com/a/D0GaL

My first instinct is to do a Ctrl-F for "password" or "security"; the first term brings nothing, the second term brings up topics about viruses and ransomware. Even if you realize that you have to go to the "Microsoft account help", you still won't find it. Right now, there's a link for "How to reset your Microsoft account password" but only under the subhed of "Trending topics" -- and I would have never found it if I didn't use Ctrl-F. And past research has found that the vast majority of Internet users do not know how to use Ctrl-F [0] (and I bet it's much worse today, given how most people now just use phone browsers).

Of course the smart thing to do is to use the Search box at the top of the support page -- in fact, I wouldn't even use that because I just use Google for everything, even for finding Stackoverflow answers. But I'm guessing most people don't.

I'd argue that the average user, unlike most anyone who even knows what a command-line interface is, does not care about an interface having "acceptable entry points". And in many such cases, it may be near impossible to design an interface for such users, whose needs and means of expressing them are infinite.

For example, I know that if I can't login to my Microsoft account because my cookies expired and I forgot my password, that I should be searching for "reset microsoft password", or even, "reset microsoft live password". However, I bet there are a lot of people who will state this:

my email doesn't work or i cant see my email

The chatbot helpfully provides a list of options, including "Signing in to Outlook.com", but just in case, options like "Unable to send email". If you search for "my email doesn't work" using the support.microsoft.com search bar, you get a list of Google-like listings pointing to the answers.microsoft.com forums, for topics like "Why doesn't my Hotmail work any more?"

I guess there's no reason why the support searchbar couldn't be tweaked to return the kind of options that the chatbot does, but the chatbot has one key advantage: there's always a "None of the above" option, which takes you to a secondary list of options. This kind of funnel IMHO is way more useful/comfortable than a search interface, in which it's not clear whether you need to rewrite your query, or keep paging through pages of increasingly irrelevant or confusing search results.

Theoretically, the chatbot funnel gets better at funneling people, based on analysis of past users' paths through the decision tree. But even a very dumb bot that doesn't intelligently respond has one more advantage: if you hit "None" a few times in succession, you'll be given a link to "Talk to a person", which signals to the user that, "OK, you win, no need to keep trying search queries, let's get you some human help".

That signal doesn't exist in a traditional webpage or search interface, so the risk is that the user keeps searching the pages in vain until they get so pissed off they just give up. Not everyone has the wherewithal to demand manual help.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy...