Not sure I buy it -- in my view chatbots only work if you can figure out the whole API while drunk, in the dark, and standing up -- but this is a good writeup of the new hotness.

So basically super simple APIs would work for Chatbots... Maybe. 

How can a brand support hundreds (better yet, hundreds of thousands) of personal conversations in parallel? One answer: deploy a bot.

...

New experiences, from booking an Uber within Facebook Messenger to listening to tweets with Amazon Echo’s Alexa, are demonstrating early utility from these new computing platforms

Agreed, Joyce.  Not sure about this but glad to see the article.

Not sure about Chatbots in general or this particular vision of it?

Facebook Messenger now has 33,000 bots:

http://pandawhale.com/post/73334/artificial-intelligence-will-eliminate-6-percent-of-american-jobs-in-five-years

Half of U.S. smartphone users download zero apps per month, a situation that seems dire for app makers.

So as app growth sputters to a halt, businesses are panicking. How can they make money if they can’t get people to download their apps? One answer is to meet users where they are — in messaging apps. And that means launching bots.

Rather than force consumers to stop what they’re doing and open a new app, chat bots allow companies to inject themselves into the places where people are already communicating. Instead of stopping to wait, download, and install an app (let alone find that app in the first place), users can call an Uber or schedule a meeting without disrupting the flow of their current conversations. This seamless experience puts services in reach of the many people who wouldn’t bother to visit the App Store.

What people really want are integrated tools that make it easier to do regular tasks in a comfortable and familiar place: Within a conversation.