Chatbots are dumb - this is true, but a chat UI is smart. I work for a large utility in the U.S. We've recently resorted to text messaging for communicating wit

Chatbots are dumb - this is true, but a chat UI is smart. I work for a large utility in the U.S. We've recently resorted to text messaging for communicating with our customers, e.g. outage/restoral notifications, whether a payment is due, setting up payment arrangements if you've fallen behind on your payments, and so forth. Our customers are loving it, however they all are going in with the expectation this is a "dumb" chatbot. It's more like the interface of the early text adventure games - people know there's a very limited vocabulary and that ultimately the computer is dumb. Even so, as a UI it can be very useful. Plus there's no app to install and update, no web site to visit, you don't need to configure and manage notifications - it's simple. Even senior citizens with extremely limited computer skills are successful using it.