What problems will chatbots solve in the next few years?

What problems will chatbots solve in the next few years?

Are there any commercial products that aren’t chat bots themselves, that are integrated with a chat bot?

Dialog system would probably be a better term here than chatbot.  There are a number of commercial use case scenarios:

• Customer relationship management, including Social CRM and Technical support for instance in Call centers, is probably the major commercial use case to date.  This includes augmented or semi-automated systems with transparent escalation, in other words hybrid mechanical turks.
• Increasingly we are seeing commercial applications in Home automation.
• Similarly, Intelligent personal assistants are rapidly being connected with the burgeoning Internet of Things.
• GPS seems to have been only the tip of the iceberg for dialog systems in vehicleTelematics.

See also my recent Quora answers to:

• What is automated journalism, and what companies other than Narrative Science are working on it?
• What are the open problems in designing intelligent conversational agents?