Agree Steve, the stadium example is pretty contrived — that’s one of the few places where the choices are few and there’s a 1000 to 1 ratio for wait staff. Baked into this article is the assumption that natural language understanding and conversational models can’t handle things like “2 beers and 2 hotdogs” and on the next line “add a bag of chips”. Ted is right that with the frameworks that are out there today you have to keep it linear and menu driven, but more natural messaging experiences are possible with the right tech. The problem is that today all that exists is scripted botkit frameworks and simplistic NLU solutions like wit.ai. Some of us are working to improve this situation…