Having worked on conversational AI (virtual agents/chatbots) for over a half a decade now, I can say that there are large differences in the capabilities of the

Having worked on conversational AI (virtual agents/chatbots) for over a half a decade now, I can say that there are large differences in the capabilities of the solutions and the quality of implementations. Some are just bad and unhelpful. Some are very good. I'm personally familiar with several voice deployments doing millions of calls a month. Not only are there obvious cost savings but the calls handled (entirely) by the virtual agents get better average cust sat metrics than human agents on the same set of calls. The first time I saw that I was surprised, but, now it is pretty typical. They absolutely can be helpful even if they are still not near to passing the Turing test.