The one case where chatbots were better than people was at a company I used to work for. We kept getting customers contacting us via facebook to ask the same qu

The one case where chatbots were better than people was at a company I used to work for. We kept getting customers contacting us via facebook to ask the same questions over and over again. "How much does `x` cost?" "When are you open?" "Where is your location?" "Do you have `y`?" I had to have an internet-connected phone on me at all times because people would send messages at any hour and response time was a factor in our discoverability on facebook. Of course all of these questions were answered on our website (AND ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE) but simply responding with a URL resulted in attrition. So I found myself running through the same script several times, all day, all night, every day, every night. The best solution would have been to set up some kind of text parser which would allow people to navigate the website through facebook messenger (oversimplifying) and then alert a human if it couldn't parse the input. We could even have hooked it into the comment feed because facebook was really bad at notifying us of comments. Taking it a step further, the Mero Mero's dream of offering facebook marketing to other companies as a service would actually be reasonable, because it wouldn't just be me sending out hundreds of copypastas 24-hours a day, forever. But I was never able to put a system together because of other time-consuming duties the company needed me to perform.