I was promised cool artificial intelligence, but all I got was lousy marketing

I rarely use Skype for anything. But I keep it running in the background, as it serves as a backup channel of communication with my Ukrainian colleagues, in case there are problems with Slack.

This morning when I turned on my computer, I had a notification from Skype about unread messages. Not from a colleague, but from Bing. Who apparently sent me 5 messages.

My first reaction was shaking my head. It's a typical Microsoft move to forcefully stuff one product into the other. But I also quickly got the suspicion that this was about their new AI based Bing chatbot. Which indeed turned out to be the case.

The chatbot gave me a brief introduction to the wonders it had to offer and asked me how it could help me today.

I decided to partly play their game, and asked it nicely to just leave me alone. When pressing Enter to send my message, I wasn't able to. Instead I was presented with a popup offering me to join a waitlist to "receive emails from Microsoft Bing, which will include offers about Microsoft Rewards, and partner products."

What a completely shitty user experience:

• Forcing an AI-powered Bing chatbot into my Skype conversations.
• Presenting itself as service I can utilise today.
• When I try interacting with it, it turns out it can't help me today.
• Instead it's all just an attempt at luring me into joining an advertising mailing list.

Boo, Microsoft! Fake door testing, riding on top of the dreadful AI hype wave, without actually providing me any of that promised AI.