Some prisons have no walls. No bars. No guards. No door you can rattle or lock you can pick. Just words — repeated often enough, by someone close enough, until those words become the voice inside your head. Until you stop questioning them. Until you start believing them. If you have ever felt consistently confused after conversations with someone you love. If you have ever walked away from an interaction feeling smaller than when you walked in. If you have ever found yourself endlessly apologizing without quite knowing what you did wrong — you may already know what this kind of prison feels like from the inside. ...

I don’t like chatbots – seldom, if not never, did they help me and they provided awful customer experiences. Most chatbots today don’t possess intelligence at all. They are more like a customized search engine. They don’t understand what customers need; they simply try their luck by presenting a list of possible canned answers. Are they useful then? Well, it depends on the matrix. Asking different sets of questions will result in different conclusions. Also, the selected respondents play a role as well. I think chatbots have their place but overrated. They are most helpful to the customers who do not have the skill or habit to search information online. For the rest, not so much. In fact, it might work against the service provider. The key is to realize when to stop talking and hand over the conversation to a real person immediately. ...