With the chatbot hype, there was a healthy number of skeptics throughout: people who wondered about the technical realities of delivering satisfying UX, ones wh

With the chatbot hype, there was a healthy number of skeptics throughout: people who wondered about the technical realities of delivering satisfying UX, ones who worried about unanswered questions about business models, and ones who figured out that this future would be most beneficial to gatekeeper-platforms who'd then act as discovery facilitators for users to select from among competing bots, rather than for botmakers themselves. It's no accident that Amazon and Google are currently leading in the consumer voice assistant market: they had large, pre-existing base of users and enough intrinsic first-party functionality to bootstrap their assistants into rudimentary usefulness, but then they built platforms where third-parties could compete for users the same way it happened for apps. In the app boom, aside from a few runaway hits, the only ones who reliably got rich were the platform-owners.