The most difficult thing to accept is maybe that even humans are bad at speech recognition. Put your mom in a chatroom to answer questions by clients of a bank,

The most difficult thing to accept is maybe that even humans are bad at speech recognition. Put your mom in a chatroom to answer questions by clients of a bank, she'll be even more lost than the robot. You need a ton of dimensions to be able to help someone: to be raised for years by humans to understand politeness, intertextual meaning, general tones, and then special enthusiasm for a specific domain to learn and enjoy helping on banking. Plus, getting money to spend on other even more interesting things in exchange for helping others motivates you to reach optimal results for your user, even if it means asking quickly other humans or sacrificing something personal for it. Most humans put in the situation of these robots would just say "sorry I don't even understand the question, can you ask someone else" lol I've seen a fantastic "chatbot" human equivalent once, at Apple of all place. Philipino guy (I'm in HK), absolutely dedicated, polite, cultured, very empathetic (phili people are usually adorable naturally but this one went above and beyond), went well beyond the minimum, and I feel weird saying that but I left the call with a smile and told colleagues around me "wow Apple, what a pleasant customer support, it's insane". I'll probably never say that of a robot however good they make them at talking so there's always going to be value in putting humans in front of clients.