I currently find customer help chatbots infuriating on pretty much every website I've used them on. It just takes you through the website's help pages in an inefficient and often circular way. Generally I don't even turn to the webchat until after I've read the help pages (which are normally very easy to find without using the webchat). When I do, I normally soldier on for a bit trying to let the bot give me what I want, before inevitably giving up and asking for a human. To their credit, this normally works. I digress...

We've had ChatGPT for over a year now. Chatbots can be good! A chatbot that is both familiar with the website and also has some clever LLM business that makes it actually read what I'm saying rather than just picking up keywords should be possible today! Maybe even better than webchat with an actual human! But I've never yet seen it.

I believe and hope that at some point in the future, I will generally have the impression that AI webchat is actually pretty good. When will this happen?

At the end of each year in the market, I will judge whether I think website chatbots are infuriating. If I do, I resolve that year YES and we go into the next year. If I do not, I resolve that year and all following years NO. (In other words, this market doesn't allow for the possibility of chatbots getting better and then worse again for some reason.)

I will obviously not bet on this very subjective market.

People are welcome to direct me towards examples of websites with good chatbots to try to influence my decision, but note that I won't resolve on just a few individual good examples, but my experience over the year as a whole.