I second you, Kyle, in some of your thoughts. Most, if not all, clients will want custom looks and feels that are in line with their brand books, additional ways of promoting extra services and bonus offerings, not specifically related to the order you place, cross-marketing capabilities, etc. That will put text based UIs into weaker position compared to graphical UIs that can provide richer capabilities.

However, I cannot agree with you about your alternative scenario. Very few people will be happy to download an app in background without their explicit consent. And if asked – very few will approve the download. Psychological and usability reasons aside, security and trust will be an issue.

QR codes are ugly because the pages and the UX behind a code are not unified, not even close to providing a similar, convenient experience. And after all, I do not have a QR code reader, I do not even know if my iphone camera app can read QR codes automatically.

So the common UX and the common point of entry (why chat apps are perfect for that? everybody uses chat apps anyway and will continue) are winning factors. Text based bots or background downloads – are not.

You can say we have other apps which everybody uses anyway – the browser and the camera app. As soon as Google or Apple comes up with a service that allows small and big businesses easily generate and customize beautiful landing pages with simple, clear step-by-step surveys or one-click order forms, and as soon as they integrate that into a camera app (if it requires scanning a code) or a browser, or a speach recognition engine, or even in a separate pre-installed app, of course preferably in all these means – this will be a blast. And I do not see a single technical obstacle to do it already now. Or it can be Kik, Whatsapp or Telegram who does it.

Finally, for the fans of closer-to-human experience that chat bots can provide – whatever you can do with a chat bot, you can also do with a simple graphical UI. Just make sure the experience and interaction is common among service providers.