I really appreciate the skepticism to counter all the hype. That said, here are a couple reasons chatbots stand a chance at being transformative (though, as you say, only for those who have good intentions)…although we have phones and love talking, the medium has two flaws that chatbots/messaging can address:

1. multi-threaded & asynchronous: i can have (and do) carry on multiple chats. Can’t do that with a phone call.;
2. there’s a text record. A recorded call still needs to be transcribed. This enables parsing, tagging, and more automated assistance and there’s hope that this will be less annoying and faster than other methods tried to date.

Anyway, overall I agree and appreciate the reminder and respect the challenges ahead. I believe businesses only spend money on what they intend to do and those that intend to deliver amazing customer service will outlast those that don’t. Chatbots have some fundamental technical advantages that will assist those companies in this important mission.