"Real Chatbots" vs Stored Questions and Responses

I've played with chatbots a little using Google Dialogflow. As Matt says above it's fairly straight-forward to create something for deployment via one of the built-in integration options (Facebook, Twitter, Skype etc).

As a stand alone piece they have loads of potential and are great for FAQs (Microsoft have quite a simple FAQ engine) but I can't see anyone ever having the budget to do any more than embed in an eLearning course as a web object.

If they were inclined, I could envisage an organisation with a massive training library using an FAQ chatbot to signpost to relevant content but my experience is of people wanting more for a lot less in the last couple of years so it's hard to imagine anyone paying for this, unless the LMS providers start building it in as a way of navigating their systems.

My favourite integrations that I've played with are Skype and Twitter. With Skype you share a URL with someone and they can click it to add the Chatbot to their Skype contacts. They then just type messages to the bot in Skype and interect with it that way. Twitter is pretty cool too as you can set it up to reply to people via DM. Again, as Matt alluded to above, integrations like this can make quite a simple premise appear more sophisticated than they actually are.

Here's a link to my basic demo which is embedded as a web object in Storyline 360: https://www.4pt-elearning.co.uk/chatbot/sl-chatbot-integration/story_html5.html