Let's not forget: in the greater scheme of things, chatbots really are still in their infancy. For those old enough to remember, picture the computer interfaces of yesteryear - say, the 80s - and ask the people who had to work with them back then how many of them enjoyed the experience. And I'm not talking about computer scientists and the likes, I mean your average office worker.

Fast forward to 2020, and you cannot throw a rock with closed eyes without hitting some kind of "computer". Smartphones, tablets, laptops, everywhere. There is not just one factor that made this change come about but a lot: arguably, computers are generally more useful today than they were back in the day, and this is part capability and part usability.

Both seem to still lack quite a bit in today's chatbots. I think a big hurdle has already been taken, though, by turning to voice rather than typing as the primary input modality. This wasn't possible just a decade ago because automatic speech recognition just didn't work well enough. But there's still lots to be desired today.

Using a conversational UI where a simple button or a few clicks would suffice is utterly useless. As is, say, having your bot read out to you a long list of movies when you ask "what's showing in the theater tonight"? Traditional GUIs are much superior here.

No, voice based interactions shine when they are about complex matters. Stuff that is too difficult or too cumbersome to express with other means. Perhaps because there a lot of different options combined in your query. Or because some inference is required on the chatbot side. Or because it's not a single query at all but -- shock! -- an actual dialog that will get you to your goal.

A small and completely made-up example:

User: I'm meeting Dana for dinner at 7, and perhaps we'd like to go and see a movie afterwards. What's on tonight?
System: Where are you having dinner?
User: In the West End.
System: Super Marvels is playing in the Broadway at 9.
User: Oh, no, Dana hates super hero movies.
System: I see. What does she like?
User: I don't know - comedies, I guess. Thrillers, maybe.
System: Well, the Broadway is also showing Dark Waters at 9.

So, this is obviously your standard ticket purchasing scenario, and you can do this perfectly fine today using any standard form-based app or website. But the point is that you don't want to go through the hassle of setting all the right parameters, such as time, location, genre etc. by hand -- especially when you're not really sure about some of them.

Compared to a dialog like the above, today's conversational UI's are very simplistic. We're still with at least one leg in the stone ages. But there is real potential here but there's also a real risk that we'll never get there because once conversational UIs get a bad rep, then it's over.

Like with any technology, if it is over-hyped with respect to what it can actually deliver (currently), it won't last. I think that is what the author of the above article has experiences. High expectations, low delivery.

I, for one, hope that we can hold on and that conversational UI's won't go the way of 3D TV (goodbye...) or VR (niche), but at this point, I wouldn't know which way to put my money on.