Anyone who has recently used a bot on Slack or Facebook will 1) laugh at this article and 2) probably cry in painful recall when looking at the screengrab above.

It’s going to be a long, long haul until the vast majority of bots are any less frictionless than this beauty.

“Likewise, with the 1–800-Flowers bot, it kept asking for my shipping address. When I said I didn’t want to give out my address again, it asked me to type in my address. It felt like I was in an eternal loop with an AI bot that is only marginally helpful and maybe even too assertive.

I doubt we’ll see any news reports about Facebook chatbots going rogue. If anything, it made me wonder if this is all going to work out as planned. If the chatbots can’t go off script at all, they are not that useful — as humans, we love to go off script. The main takeaway from testing the bots so far is that they all seem rather dull and lifeless.”

John Brandon in Computerworld