I work for GYANT[0], and we're building a chatbot for doing medical triage, patient follow-up, and answering health questions. We're young (launching this Thursday actually), but it's already been pretty successful in a number of countries (like Brazil) with a few hundred thousand users with minimal marketing. My girlfriend was able to use it without issues to go from "my throat hurts" to visiting a doctor in 24 hours because she likely has tonsillitis. The interest and response from the medical, the pharmaceutical, and the insurance communities have been very positive and they're approaching us left and right to bring this out to more users.
Chatbots were probably overhyped and oversold to people. Not every platform needs to explode overnight and produce SV unicorns. I think there is immense value in chatbots as a platform, but expectations should be tempered. I've seen little to no overt marketing to regular users that they can ask a bot rather than looking for an app or website. Most users don't really want to download and learn another app and create another account for every little thing. Additionally, many budget phones in emerging markets have limited data, limited storage space, and minimal specs for downloading and running apps for every little thing.
That said, this article is pretty terrible. It almost seems like they chose the worst possible examples to fit a given narrative.
0: http://gyant.com/english/
Chatbots were probably overhyped and oversold to people. Not every platform needs to explode overnight and produce SV unicorns. I think there is immense value in chatbots as a platform, but expectations should be tempered. I've seen little to no overt marketing to regular users that they can ask a bot rather than looking for an app or website. Most users don't really want to download and learn another app and create another account for every little thing. Additionally, many budget phones in emerging markets have limited data, limited storage space, and minimal specs for downloading and running apps for every little thing.
That said, this article is pretty terrible. It almost seems like they chose the worst possible examples to fit a given narrative.
0: http://gyant.com/english/