Did chatbots miss their “Apollo Moment”? Potential, gaps, and lessons from using collaboration assistants during COVID-19

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have long been positioned as a tool to provide crucial data-driven decision support to people. In this survey paper, I look at how collaboration assistants (chatbots for short), a type of AI that allows people to interact with them naturally (such as using speech, gesture, and text), have been used during a true global exigency—the COVID-19 pandemic. The key observation is that chatbots missed their “Apollo Moment” when at the time of need, they could have provided people with useful and life-saving contextual, personalized, and reliable decision support at a scale that the state-of-the-art makes possible. By “Apollo Moment”, I refer to the opportunity for a technology to attain the pinnacle of its impact. I review the chatbot capabilities that are feasible with existing methods, identify the potential that chatbots could have met, and highlight the use-cases they were deployed on, the challenges they faced, and gaps that persisted. Finally, I draw lessons that, if implemented, would make them more relevant in future health emergencies.