Everyone read this [0] and now think it's The Next Big Thing™. That and Slack, I guess?

I don't get it either. The nice thing about not typing out requests ("it's not a command-line interface," they all say) to perform virtual actions is that you don't have to type out requests to perform virtual actions. And having different apps and websites for different purposes gives you choice, privacy, and control over who you interact with online. You don't have to get locked in to a platform and hope they never do anything nefarious or user-unfriendly for fear there's nowhere else to turn.

But I guess we're the minority.

[0] https://medium.com/chris-messina/2016-will-be-the-year-of-co...

I think people are conflating bots with something intelligent, some people go so far as to say AI bots, which is very misleading. There's a lot of hype around autonomous agents, with not a lot of understanding.

I'm assuming they are trying to replicate the success Chinese platforms, like WeChat.

I could see it being useful as an interface for Siri to a website