Although the hype about chatbots is increasing, chatbot failure stories continue to get more visibility as well. However, success stories are rare, and ambitious conversational interface designers need to study them because, for every hundred failures, there are only a few success stories.
We compiled a list of 24 successful chatbot examples and example scripts from different applications. Our list contains the best chatbots for different applications and business use cases, such as, sales chatbots to friendly bots.
Learnings from studying hundreds of chatbots
We have seen companies that focus on their users’ important needs, set realistic targets and pay attention to usability build successful bots. Leveraging large language models (LLMs) and generative AI in chatbot design enables the generation of contextually relevant responses and enhances the chatbot’s ability to handle diverse user queries.
It is important to know that not all chatbots are success stories. From our research, we stumbled upon numerous chatbot failures.
See success stories:
Chatbots for general use
Chatbots can act as digital friends and entertainers:
1-DeepSeek R1
DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, has recently garnered significant attention for developing advanced AI models at a fraction of the typical industry costs. Notably, their DeepSeek-V3 model was trained using approximately 2,000 Nvidia H800 GPUs over 55 days, incurring a cost of around $5.58 million. In contrast, leading AI companies often utilize up to 16,000 GPUs for similar tasks, with expenses reaching approximately $100 million.
However, subsequent analyses have revealed that the initial $5.58 million figure represents only the pre-training computation costs, excluding expenses such as research and development, maintenance, and hardware investments. Reports suggest that when accounting for these additional factors, the total expenditure for developing DeepSeek’s AI models exceeds $1.5 billion.
Despite this, DeepSeek’s approach to optimizing resource has highlighted potential limitations of U.S. sanctions aimed at restricting China’s access to advanced AI technologies.
2- GPT-4o
It is hard to talk about conversational AI and not mention the latest version of GPT. Its ease with grammar and creativity make it a great chat partner with numerous developers releasing their GPT4o based chatbots.
In this video below, you can watch how a person can prepare to an interview with GPT-4o. GPT’s way of having a conversation that almost sounds human. The level of training enables these AI bots to make jokes, express their feelings about being robots, and discuss philosophical topics such as friendship, love, and existing like a human in the real world.
3- Microsoft’s Little Ice, XiaoIce in Chinese, became a social media phenomenon
XiaoIce is Microsoft’s biggest chatbot success story and along with GPT-3, it is one of the most technically sophisticated bots on our list. In just three months following its launch in July 2014, XiaoIce had 0.5 billion conversations.
After becoming independent of Microsoft, in 2021, the company reached a valuation of 1$B following rounds of funding.1
She has been ranked as Weibo’s top influencer with 850K+ followers.
Some metrics that prove her success are:
- The average number of dialogue turns per individual conversation (CPS) is 23 which is even higher than human conversations.
- The average person who added XiaoIce talked to her more than 60 times per month. On average, she even passed the Turing test for 10 minutes, meaning that speakers failed to identify her as a bot in that interval.
- Designed by Alan Turing in 1950, the Turing test was one of the first ones designed to measure AI capabilities. XiaoIce passing that test was significant.
Successes
But what made the chatbot so successful? Since she’s only fluent in Chinese, we couldn’t complete a detailed analysis of all her capabilities. However, these are her frequently discussed abilities:
- Fluid, natural-like speech, enabled by text mining: As any one who frequently interacts with bots can tell you, it is rare to find a natural sounding bot. Microsoft team had to achieve this in Mandarin which is more difficult to tackle than English, because meaning in Chinese is more often implied by nuance and context versus grammatical structure. To address this, Microsoft team indexed over 7 million public conversations on the web.
- Image recognition: XiaoIce understands images which allows her to interact in a richer way with users.
- Context understanding: XiaoIce understands context and relations between entities, as demonstrated below:
Going forward
Despite such setbacks, Microsoft is going ahead with chatbot development. It is crucial in speech where humans interrupt one another continuously allowing an efficient interchange of ideas. This can be more efficient and fluid than the walkie-talkie style where you have to listen to the speaker even when she is mentioning things you are already aware of.
Lately, XiaoIce’s intelligence has been applied in diverse areas such as poetry. However, we couldn’t find much evidence on the commercial success of such applications
4- Kuki, formerly known as Mitsuku, wins prizes for her engaging conversations
Founded in 2005, Kuki is a relatively old chatbot. Kuki does not serve any specific purpose, but rather aims to engage and entertain users. It has earned Loebner Prize for ability to have human-like conversations. However, the award, now discontinued, was criticized within the AI community, for being based on subjective assessment of judges after a short conversation with the bots. Still, Kuki has been performing pretty well for a relatively old bot.
5- Replika.ai got 500K Android downloads to clone people
Replika launched with a viral marketing campaign where customers could gain codes by inviting 3 friends to join the waitlist.
Negatives
Replika can come across as a bit creepy. Interactions with Replika are relatively “flirty” and intended for companionship.
Moreover, there is not much it can do. Replika cannot set an alarm or order comfort food for the user. With the codes now out in the wild, hopefully, we’ll see developments. It asks a potentially endless barrage of questions and follows your social media (if you allow it) to understand you enough to be an engaging conversationalist.
Positives
Following its launch in 2017, Eugenia Kuyda, the co-founder of the company, claimed that 1.5 million people were waiting to interact with the bot.2 By 2022, the subreddit dedicated to Replika has 43K active members. There are even cases where the user claims that their Replika fell in love when users check in regularly.
Going forward
In 2018, Kuyda, and her team of developers, released Replika’s codes under CakeChat for open source access, with the hope that developers could build alternative emotional chatbots to Replika, yet capable of undertaking other tasks.
As mentioned, interactions with Replika all tend to get flirty, rather quick, as the bot seems to be solely intended for intimate companionship. So there’s not much you can do with it — it cannot set an alarm for you or order comfort food. But with the codes now out in the wild, we’ll hopefully see developments.
6- Insomnobot-3000 for people with insomnia
This entertainment bot is your late night friend. Intended for insomniacs, the bot becomes “extra chatty” between 11pm and 5am, local time. You can say anything to it and it will reply to keep you company when sleep eludes you.
A screenshot of Insomnobot-3000 website.
The bot is developed by the mattress company Casper. Perhaps it is a marketing, and targeting, technique for the company to learn which sections of the populations have trouble sleeping, in order to introduce them to Casper’s mattresses. The performance metrics on the bot are not available, but it seems as if the bot has no distinctive capability besides ghosting the user until 11pm, and only offering wisecracks from thereafter until sunrise.
Customer service chatbots
Customer service bots resolve client queries such as answering FAQs or following up on a shipment status. These bots should help increase user engagement and satisfaction with their timely answers. Thus, chatbots are important part of conversational commerce strategies of companies.
7- Zoho SalesIQ
Success story
LambdaTest is a cloud platform focused on continuous quality testing, helping developers and testers with faster web, mobile, and visual testing. They aimed for a rapid, under 60-second response time to meet their users’ urgent needs. To achieve this, they implemented Zoho SalesIQ, which integrates with Zoho CRM and Desk. SalesIQ’s chat widgets, canned replies, and bots enabled customer engagement, while Zoho CRM provided vital customer data.
The result was a 40% increase in operator efficiency and faster support responses. GPT interaction helped redirecting queries to the right department automatically.
Education Chatbot
8- CustomGPT AI
The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship aimed to consolidate knowledge from various sources into a single platform. They sought an AI solution capable of delivering accurate, citation-backed responses without fabricated information.
Using CustomGPT’s platform, MIT integrated data from documents, helpdesk repositories, and YouTube videos. This integration enabled the creation of ChatMTC. It offered entrepreneurs accurate information and based on MIT’s resources with anti-hallucination technology.
Healthcare chatbots
9- Dr. A.I.? already makes recommendations like a Doctor
Developed by the healthcare app, HealthTap, Dr. A.I.? reads patients’ symptoms, asks follow-up questions, and analyzes their data stored in the HealthTap app to connect patients with a specialized doctor in the vicinity. Dr. A.I.? uses HealthTap’s database of answers written by medical doctors to make the right recommendations regarding what next steps the patient should take. The latter can range from reading doctor recommendations to scheduling a virtual or in-person doctor visit or seeking urgent care.
Therapist chatbots
10- Woebot is a free therapy chatbot
Woebot is created by Alison Darcy, a clinical psychologist at Stanford University. It launched as an iOS app in 2018. Woebot uses cognitive-behavioral therapy to deliver scripted responses to users. 70 college students dealing with depression tested Woebot and their improvements were published in a research paper demonstrating significant benefits.3
11- Wysa raises funds to address employees’ mental health
Wysa is a therapy chatbot that has gotten more than 100k positive user reviews.4 The chatbot was created in 2016 for individuals and employees alike to navigate their ways through stress, depression, anxiety, and other psychological distresses.
In 2021, Wysa was able to raise $5.5M in Series A funding to specifically focus on employee mental health.5 That was perhaps following the rise in interest in employee mental health, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic and stresses of occupational and health uncertainties.
12- X2AI’s Tess is a psychologist augmentation chatbot
Available both on a phone number and on Facebook’s Messenger, Tess uses a variety of psychological approaches to support patients, and allows psychologists to engage with a higher number of patients.6 Tess gives users the opportunity to talk to it if they are having a panic attack or put their thoughts into order before going to sleep.
A capability that distinguishes Tess from other therapy chatbots is that it uses ML to remember and use the data interactions it has to increase the accuracy and personalization of its recommendation. So when you close the app and open it again, you are not talking to a blank canvas, but rather a companion that remembers your confrontations at work or food allergies.
Explore chatbot use cases in healthcare in our in-depth article on the topic.
Conversion boosters & sales bots
While sales bots don’t have publicly available stats on their tractions, they are widely applicable. Market leader vendors developing sales bots can be successful if they can build a powerful solution.
13- Landbot.io for landing pages
Landbot.io gives businesses the opportunity to build their own chatbots through their visual, no-code chatbot builder. Landbot’s chatbot uses conditional logic (if X then Y) to convert leads into customers.
An insurance provider conglomerate, was able to achieve a 90% success rate in terms of assisting current clients with their insurance claims and converting potential leads into customers.
14- Dominos eases the process of ordering a pizza with a bot
Dominos leverages a restaurant chatbot to provide a frictionless order process. Also acting as l a PR initiative to improve their brand awareness, Dominos built a chatbot on Facebook Messenger. With the bot, they are enabling customers to order pizza from any location. The customers can also personalize their orders from the bot, such as telling it if they want any extra toppings or specific kinds of crust.
15- Kian is boosting conversions
Kian claims to increased the conversion rate on Kia’s website from 7% to 21%. Chatbots have a big role to play in complex B2C interactions, such as car sales, where they are able to answer complex questions quickly. As an additional bonus, chatbots provide a consistent sales experience across a wide range of channels.
16- Financial advisors
It is challenging to keep expenditure under control. And managing personal finances is getting more difficult to tackle nowadays, with plenty of digital subscriptions available, most of which can go unnoticed after some time.
Chatbots can help users manage subscriptions, take advantage of discounts and improve their financial literacy. For example, Trim analyzes and processes spending data. It identifies subscribed but forgotten services and helps users take advantage of better offers from utilities like cable. Working in Facebook messenger, Trim allows users easy access to their financial data and unlock savings. Trim claims to have saved more than 40 million for its users.
Travel chatbots
17- Emirates Vacations
Emirates Airlines created a chatbot for its travel recommendation platform. Their chatbot strategy is more innovative than its peers, because they combined conversational AI technology with on-site display ads.
The bot asks questions such as the type of trip that you’ll be embarking upon and registers the user’s intent, as well as the web page that the user is on. The chatbot then personalizes the vacation planning process by offering them travel packages and providing relevant information about the location. They claim that the results for their 30-day test were positive: They experienced an 87% increase in engagement from consumers that saw the chatbot ad versus those that saw a standard display ad.7
18- Dutch airline KLM, provides flight details through Facebook Messenger
Any flight notification can be directed to the passenger through Facebook messenger. This can be regarding the delay or a friendly reminder for check-in. Users can also in return, engage with the airline to update their meal preference or seat location.
Explore our articles about travel chatbot and hospitality chatbot use cases and applications.
Digital assistants
19- Alexa: the voice bot that resulted in largest revenues
With an expected 125M units of shipment until 2025, Amazon’s Alexa is by far the most financially successful chatbot with Amazon behind it. Amazon’s market capitalization of $1.57T by February 2022, and the management’s belief that voice commerce continued rise of popularity, ensures that Alexa gets the full support of Amazon.
By 2021, Alexa had 80K+ skills in the US alone. Skills in Alexa terminology are applications that allow Alexa to complete certain voice tasks. With its vast developer community, Alexa is more skilled than any other chatbot. She can help you shop, listen to music, run polls, and control your house’s ambient light.
20- Google Assistant
Available on all Android phones, Google Assistant is a holistic digital concierge. Google assistant serves as a response suggestion engine in Google’s messaging platforms. Additionally, assistants can answer questions and learn about users to offer them personalized news or suggestions.
Because Google Assistant comes in-built into phones, it does not have a big of a market, in terms of speaker shipment, as does Alexa. It has; however, caught up with Alexa in recent years (see Figure 1).
And by 2019, Google Assistant’s enhanced AI software had put it ahead of its main competitors (Siri and Alexa), in terms of correctly answering queries about local news, e-commerce, navigation, general information, and commands (see Figure 2).
21- x.ai’s Amy is already getting flowers from admirers
Having launched in 2014, x.ai’s Amy scheduled 1M+ meetings and received flowers and chocolate from people who know that she is a bot.8 Amy doesn’t yet have a voice but she’s extremely easy to use, just sign up @ x.ai and include “amy@x.ai” to your emails where you need scheduling.
x.ai team aimed to give Amy a consistent personality, with a reviewer with Harvard drama major approving all of Amy’s predefined statements available on its knowledge base. Her relatively limited domain is also an advantage: She shouldn’t be expected to answer random questions about life; she should simply be identifying matching availability.
Survey bots
22- Polly wants to know more about you
Polly is a survey bot on Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Enterprise. The chatbot is mostly used to collect employee data, like their satisfaction during a meeting, the working environment, or any situation where the employees’ voice needs to be heard. The insights gained from the surveys can then be turned into data-driven decision-making.
Legal bots
23- Do not Pay, overturns $4M worth parking tickets for free
Coded by 19-year-old Stanford University student Joshua Browder, DoNotPay helps users contest parking tickets in an easy-to-use, chat-like interface. In the first 21 months of service, DoNotPay took 250,000 cases and won 160K appealing over $4m of parking tickets.
Since then, it’s expanded its features to 100 different legal processes, from helping users get eligibility for college fee waivers to connecting with a prison inmate.
Content automation
24- Automated Insight’s Wordsmith writes press-ready articles
Automated Insights wouldn’t call Wordsmith a chatbot. After all, it produces a pretty one-sided conversation: it generates reports from data. However, its language manipulation and content generation capabilities earned it a spot on our list and Automated Insights boasts that it is the only public API for natural language generation.
Just add Wordsmith to your Excel, Word or Tableau document and it will use the underlying data to prepare concise verbal summaries of the data. Wordsmith creates:
- 4K company earnings reports/quarter for the Associated Press
- 50K personalized narratives/week for greatcall
- 100K workout recaps/week for bodybuilding.com
25- Toutiao offers tailored news
Toutiao, or “headline news” is a popular news aggregation service in China. As of 2021, Touriao had 148M, active users, spending 87 minutes on the news app on average.9
A fun fact is that Toutiao’s algorithm is the same one that’s leveraged on TickTock. In recent years; however, the same algorithm that is responsible for offering tailored articles and content to individuals (through machine learning and data collection to learn more about them) is facing a governmental crackdown. This puts the future growth of the bot in doubt.
For more on chatbots and best practices
While it’s hard to believe, we did not cover all the use cases of chatbots in this article. So if you’re curious about them, read:
- Top 5 Expectations Concerning the Future of Conversational A
- Top 5 Conversational Commerce Examples & Success Stories
- Government Chatbots: Benefits, Use Cases, & Case Studies
Moreover, if you are interested in building your own chatbot:
- We have articles on the chatbot companies and conversational commerce platforms that will help you take your bot/conversational commerce concept from idea to implemenation.
- And we have data-driven lists of chatbot platform vendors and voice bot platform vendors on our website.
We will help you choose the best conversational AI platform that can answer your needs:
External Links
- 1. ”Microsoft Chatbot Spinoff Xiaoice Reaches $1 Billion Valuation”
- 2. ”Replika AI Confidant Raises $6.5 million in Series A.2 Funding On Heels of the Personal Chatbot Opening to 1.5 Million Users on the Waitlist”
- 3. ”Delivering Cognitive Behavior Therapy to Young Adults With Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety Using a Fully Automated Conversational Agent (Woebot): A Randomized Controlled Trial”
- 4. Wysa: Anxiety, therapy chatbot - Apps on Google Play.
- 5. ”AI-powered chatbot Wysa brings in $5.5M to focus on employee mental health”
- 6. ”Psychological Artificial Intelligence Service, Tess: Delivering On-demand Support to Patients and Their Caregivers: Technical Report”
- 7. ”Emirates Vacations puts AI-powered chatbot directly into ads”
- 8. ”With love from my robot: virtual assistants may secretly be emailing you”
- 9. ”Controlling hearts and minds: China cracks down on content algorithms to make sure the Communist Party is still boss”
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