I tried a ton of chatbots. Here’s the good and the bad.

There’s a lot of shouting from the rooftops about how chatbots are the future. They’re killing apps! They’re taking over our jobs! They’re changing the world!

What captured the public’s imagination was this animation showing how wonderful flight bookings can become with a bot:

Yet we’re still far away from that tantalizing future. I fiddled around with a bunch them, and it’s a mixed bag. Some were kinda useful, but most were forgettable or useless. Here what I found out after I romped through the bot landscape:

News bots won’t change your life

News bots generally have two features: news alerts and news search. CNN, TechCrunch, Digg, and yes, Tech in Asia have bots on Facebook Messenger.

They’re useful if you’re a huge fan of their articles, or if you happen to have Facebook open and want to find articles about Donald Trump on CNN.

But they won’t become the primary way I get news. I’ve already painstakingly curated my Facebook News Feed over the years to serve content I want, extracted from many publications.

And if I want to read something specific, I use Google. Breaking news alerts from bots might be useful. But my news apps have those too.

News bots just don’t give me enough benefits to break existing habits.

What would the ideal news bot look like? It’ll aggregate multiple news sources. It’ll let me find specific content with Google-like precision. And it’ll let me view content in its full glory without leaving Facebook, perhaps via Instant Articles.

You can’t book flights in a travel bot

Skyscanner has a nifty Facebook bot for booking flights. You can do a complex query on it, although it has its flaws, such as failing to recognize that I wanted a one-way ticket:

This isn’t bad, but unfortunately, it doesn’t let you book flights from within Facebook. After choosing a flight, you’ll still be directed to the Skyscanner website. This limits its utility.

Specific but limited advice from a health advice bot

Many Facebook bots are hard to use

Telegram made me a bot-believer

The chatbot is a feature, not a business